“We can choose not to go to the museum, but everyone will go through the school”. It is with these words borrowed from one of his predecessors that the architect Vittorio Leone, who designed the new Malpassé-Les Oliviers school (13th arrondissement), introduced his presentation. A way of summing up the central place occupied by schools in our lives, and the need to take special care of them.
In Marseille, where a seminar was held this Wednesday devoted to school buildings, this assertion resonates particularly at the start of the launch of the major maneuvers of the “school plan”. This part of the “Marseille plan in large” announced by Emmanuel Macron in September 2021, provides for the major renovation of 188 of the 470 primary schools in the city, and the upgrading of 290 of them.
A program that will take place in seven waves, over a period of ten years, for an estimated amount of 1.2 billion euros excluding taxes, including 400 million provided by the State. “Pharaonic works”, underlined Pierre-Marie Ganozzi, deputy in charge of the said plan. Works of which the first wave allowed the renovation of seven school groups which should be delivered for the start of the 2024-2025 school year. The construction sites will follow one another with a new phase per year. Depending on the case, with demolition-reconstruction or renovation, two processes with similar costs.
And if a first “draft” of the order of passage of the various establishments entering into this plan has been drawn up, the municipal services and the Public Society of Marseille Schools (SPEM), do not wish to pour out on it. “The impatience is enormous. And I want that, when there is a project, we have the certainty of carrying it out as announced”, summarizes Vincent Bourjaillat, the director of the SPEM.
Build for history
In the meantime, it is the directors of establishments who are in uncertainty. And many did not hesitate to say so during this study day. “We would simply like to know when the work will start with us”, calls out, for example, a kindergarten director from Frais-Vallon, who is also worried that the numerous routine interviews will no longer be carried out by then. Another teacher notes that the demolition of part of the establishment adjoining the playground has begun, “but that there is asbestos”.
This seminar was obviously welcome to create these times of exchange. The afternoon allowed teachers to meet around workshops aimed at drawing up a school building charter in Marseille. Because this day was also the occasion of a presentation on the history of the school building of the Guizot law of 1933, which plans to make available “a municipal room suitably arranged to house the teacher and welcome the pupils”, to the tall architectures of the city centers of the Jules Ferry era, passing by the Popular Front, the post-war schools of René Egger, an architect from Marseille, and up to the filthy prefabricated schools of the 1960s and 70s, say Pailleron. There are around fifty of them built on this model in Marseille and are a priority in the list of establishments to be renovated.
And it is in all this history that this renovation program of a scale unequaled in France intends to fit. “We want to create beauty and take up the climate challenge”, wished Pierre-Marie Ganozzi. “It is a political project”, also recalled the elected official. “We believe that schools should be the ‘capitals’ of neighborhoods. Let them also be open on it. That the gymnasium also serves associations. That the toy library can also open for residents outside school hours. »