In front of the Gabriel-Péri college in Aubervilliers, Babou and Boubakar, both pupils in the fourth grade are chatting with their friends. If the wearing of the mask is compulsory within the establishment, only a teenager wears a good fixed on his face.
This Friday, June 5, these young people made their return to this college located in priority education network, remained closed since the beginning of confinement. Last week, almost all of the 130 colleges in Seine-Saint-Denis reopened. The last openings are scheduled for the week.
“We only had lessons this morning with our head teachers for the pre-entry. It was weird, there were only twelve of us in the class! We haven’t done much. We mainly talked about the new cleanliness rules to follow. Classes will really start on Monday, but we will only come in the morning and on staggered schedules to avoid crossing paths too much between us, ”describes Babou, one of the students with academic difficulties recalled by the establishment.
“Online school is not my thing”
“I don’t have very good results at school, so I was offered to come back,” he explains. It is true that I did not work much during confinement. Distance education is not for me. An observation shared by his friend Boubakar. “I too did not do much during confinement, online school is not my thing,” admits the young man.
If the Ministry of National Education had indicated during the press conference of the government that the reopening of the colleges concerned pupils of 6 e and 5e, the academic direction of Seine-Saint-Denis could extend the measure to the young people of 4e and 3rd in school dropout.
Returning to the establishment, however, is always on the basis of family volunteering.
“We played soccer during confinement”
Has fear of the virus been an obstacle? “No, our parents were not afraid that we would come back to class. We played soccer at the bottom of the city during the confinement, ”say the middle school students. If the academic direction does not communicate figures on the number of pupils who returned to their establishments, “we have on average more than 50% of the 6th and 5th who returned”, estimates Radouane M’Hamdi, departmental secretary of the union of SNPDEN school heads.
