When they came to power, environmentalists made an inventory of the maintenance and construction needs of schools. The state of affairs forced them to review their priority. Their revegetation plan now coexists with upgrading Lyon schools to standards. The majority are committed to investing nearly 300 million, four times more than during the last term of Gérard Collomb.
The years when town planning captured a large part of investment are definitely over. The investment plan of the City of Lyon, the first of the environmentalists, gives pride of place to schools. The education delegation will be the first budget item in the mandate plan with a colossal envelope of 298 million euros, up 286% compared to Gérard Collomb’s last mandate. The municipal team sets itself the goal of making them “Enter into the ecological transition”. During the campaign, environmentalists planned to invest heavily in school groups. Their inventory, by taking possession of power, prompted them to review the budget envelope upwards. “The buildings in the city are rather in poor condition. Schools have not been sufficiently maintained and developed during previous terms. The investments were not sufficient ”, points out Stéphanie Léger, assistant to the City of Lyon in charge of education. “Even with the means that we have planned to invest, we will not be able to upgrade the 206 municipal schools in Lyon. In some school groups, we would have liked to have done more extensive renovations, but we had to postpone them in time. There are sometimes decades of delay in maintenance work. We are not going to be able to catch up to them completely. We find professionals exhausted by their working conditions ”, underlines Patrick Odiard, education assistant for the 8th arrondissement and himself a school teacher.
An observation also shared by the opposition like Pierre Oliver, LR mayor of the 2nd arrondissement: “Lyon’s schools are not in good condition. In my district, there are establishments that are not up to the level of what we should offer children. ” “Some schools are starting to be dilapidated in Lyon”, abounds Boris Charetiers, vice-president of the FCPE du Rhône who evokes feedback from parents of students on the sanitary facilities. The majority initially thought to devote a larger part of this envelope to the greening of schoolyards, but revised its copy by drawing up district by district an inventory of the municipal school heritage.
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