Up to 500 French schools to be totally or partly closed Monday: minister / Photo: © AFP
Up to 500 French schools to be totally or partly closed Monday: minister
Up to 500 schools across France will be totally or partly closed on Monday due to the protests by teenage pupils that have shaken the country, the education minister said.
Lessons will be "totally or partly suspended" in some "400-500" high schools as the security conditions "have not been fulfilled", said Education Minister Edouard Geffray on Sunday, adding that 24 schools had been "burned or ransacked" since the start of the movement.
The teens at French high schools, known as lycées, say that their studies are being ruined by high teacher absences, overlong school days and dilapidated facilities as well as other grievances.
Geffray said thar the number of schools affected on Monday would be comparable to the figure from Friday but vowed there would be a "partial, progressive return to lessons".
- 'Deliberately targeted' -
The movement began at a Paris school on September 17 but grew last week into nationwide protests marked by outbursts of violence involving protesters and security forces, which sometimes used tear gas and batons to disperse the crowds.
"There are activists -- particularly from the far-left -- who have infiltrated the high school student movement, hijacked it from the students themselves, and engaged in extreme violence," said Gefrray.
"Clearly, this poses a risk to both our staff and our students," he said, adding that 78 education staff members had been wounded -- "something we have never seen before".
"They were deliberately targeted because they were employees of the national education system," Geffray said.
Organisers have called for the protests to continue on Tuesday, citing a lack of "concrete measures" from the government.
Over 5,000 people, some 85 percent of them minors, have been arrested since the start of the movement but critics have also accused police of heavy-handed tactics.
A 16-year-old was detained on Sunday over the assault of a teacher in the southern town of La Ciotat. The teacher, 59, was doused with gasoline and struck on the sidelines of a high school student protest on Friday.
A video circulating on social media shows an individual dressed entirely in black with a masked face splashing liquid onto the teacher, who then clutches his face while a tree burns nearby.
E.Dorame--LGdM
