Rising Incidents in School Settings: Challenges Faced by the Autonomous Secular Solidarity (ASL)

Behind the gates of a school in Lot-et-Garonne, the grandmother was filming recess. In the courtyard, his granddaughter, the other students and his school teacher. The grandmother criticized the teacher for not respecting the rule.

Further back in time, in Agen, a music teacher one day receives a call from friends staying abroad. They had just seen him on a YouTube video, recorded without his consent. The video has been removed from the feed. Other examples: a head of establishment is alerted to the existence of an online petition against her.

The teacher among the girls

Three files that the Autonome de solidarité (ASL 47) has had to manage in recent years for its members, there are 2000 of them in Lot-et-Garonne. In 2022, after the start of the school year, a primary school student tries to escape from school by climbing on the gate. The teacher wanted to stop him, that’s her role. The child had scratches related to the adult’s emergency intervention. “The grandmother wanted to file a complaint” remembers Claire Candelon, president of ASL 47/. She herself says she has avoided “two or three blows” from parents in her career. A non-ASL member, a literature teacher says she did the right thing by also avoiding a chair in the classroom. Less sad, a student extolled the merits of the proportions of his sex to one of his teachers. Complaint was filed in 2023, the case is ongoing.

Or this PE teacher who hears screams in the girls’ locker room. “It was his responsibility to intervene to stop the trouble.” The teacher and his wife were questioned by a judicial police officer. “They came out crying…” Beyond the over-media coverage of a handful of cases in the country, the daily lives of teaching teams and National Education staff are punctuated by these incidents within colleges, high schools, schools. “These are often indirect attacks, such as throwing a school bag or damaging vehicles […] In the first degree, some parents may have a more agile hand.”

19 dossiers

Lot-et-Garonne is not a special case. For the 2022-2023 school year, ten files have been opened for headteachers who have had problems with parents. ASL 47 identified 19 cases which required legal protection to be put in place, whether they ended with a criminal decision or not. More surprising: in secondary education, the majority of cases reported to the association concern a conflict with the hierarchy.

Over the same period of time, 24 members of the Autonome requested its assistance with legal information. “It doesn’t matter who the teachers contact. The important thing is that the red signal lights up and that colleagues are not left alone” remarks Jean-Louis Linder, national vice-president, present in Agen this Thursday. This manager hammers home the message: “there is a real feeling of isolation and abandonment” and even speaks of a “continued nuisance” and a “climate of anxiety”. And Claire Candelon also makes the observation: “There was a feeling of body through the initial training from which we all benefit. It no longer exists through the changes in this training and this accentuates the process of isolation.”