“There was a mistake, a mistake. These families should not have received these letters”, assures Gabriel Attal, Monday September 25, in front of the Versailles rectorate. The Minister of National Education continues his transparency and firmness operation in the face of school harassment. He went to meet the staff and the new rector of this academy, after the revelation by BFM-TV of a letter with a threatening tone sent to the parents of Nicolas, the teenager who committed suicide at the beginning of September in Poissy.
This type of letter is usually addressed to families who threaten or attack national education officials. According to Mr. Attal, for the 2022-2023 school year, “120 so-called letters of disapproval” were sent by the rectorate of Versailles, marked, in 2020, by the assassination of history and geography professor Samuel Paty. And “55 seem to ask questions”announced the minister on Monday, who is still awaiting additional investigations to shed light on these dysfunctions.
The scandal comes as Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne is due to present, Wednesday, September 27, an interministerial plan to combat harassment. Among the avenues explored: confiscating the mobile phones of student harassers, banning them from social networks, sending a questionnaire to all students to detect “weak signals”empathy lessons in primary schools or the strengthening of the pHARe program (program to combat bullying at school) currently being generalized in schools.
Gabriel Attal confirmed, Monday, in Versailles, that he also wanted to strengthen the resources of the rectorates with “dedicated staff” in the fight against harassment. “The situation cannot be managed with letters, but with humans”assures the minister.
“I regret not having been aware of these letters”
The management by the Versailles academy of this scourge which affects nearly one in ten students has become, in a few days, the symbol of the failings of national education in this area. The letter received on May 4 by the parents of young Nicolas, who committed suicide on September 5, at the age of 15, provoked a first controversy in mid-September, before a second letter , on certain points similar to the first and also sent by the rectorate of Versailles, is revealed, Friday September 22, by BFM-TV.
Dissatisfied with the school’s reaction after suspicions of touching of his 11-year-old daughter by an after-school leader, the father of a student filed a complaint against the one received by Nicolas’s parents, at the beginning of May.
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