Foreign Children Banned From School

After a stay at the detention centre at Lyon Saint-Exupéry airport this summer, Gracia, aged five, and Béni, aged three, were last week refused access to the canteen at their nursery school in Digoin, in the Saône-et-Loire. Their mother, Florence Mayuma, fled the democratic Republic of Congo and her application for political asylum was refused. In June, she was thrown out of the welcome centre for asylum seekers, taken into an emergency centre, arrested, sent into detention with her two children, then released, the decision to escort her back to the border having been quashed by the law. She now holds a provisional authorisation to stay ; this should enable her to start the procedures over again. But the UMP party mayor of Digoin, Maxime Castagna, said he feared being taken to court for helping foreigners without visas or residence permits to enter the country and stay. He therefore banned the children from entering the school canteen. On Saturday, after the mobilisation of the RESF (Réseau Ėducation Sans Frontières – Education Without Borders Network), he was forced to go back on his decision.

This particular case is just the latest in a series of attempts by town councils to rid themselves of children whose parents do not have the required papers or whose situation is complicated. In 2005, in Montfermeil (93), the mayor Xavier Lemoine, excluded from school the children of parents without residence permits. In Palaja, in the Aude region, the mayor refused to accept Romani children (aged six, five and three) due to a “lack of places” and “parking in an inappropriate space”. In Romainville (93), the mayor Corinne Valls, of the Divers Gauche, refused to provide schooling for thirty or so children whose parents live in social housing, on the pretext that she was protesting against the decision by the authorities to house families with difficult social situations, in her town. In order to educate their children, foreign or not, those who are unemployed or in paid employment, submit fake certificates of residency in neighbouring towns and their children spend hours travelling to and from school.

So far such cases have been quite rare in metropolitan France. But the desire on the part of the government to only enrol those pupils who have the correct papers, from nursery school through to high school, a system that has already been implemented in the universities, has been in the pipeline for some time. Young people who are scarcely eighteen years old have already been tracked down and, in French Guyana, 2 000 to 3 000 children with “illegal” status are not provided with an education. “In the Pupil database”, explains Alain Doustalet, who represents the Federation of parents associations at the RESF, “it is obligatory to fill in the “nationality" box. Afterwards, checking whether the parents have the correct papers and preventing those who don’t from entering the school will be easy. It is possible that the names will be handed over to the Ministry for Immigration so that they can fill their charter planes. I’m not predicting a catastrophic situation. The circular on children in schools whose parents do not have residence permits has already been used to that end. Everything points to the worst case scenario. But let’s not forget that fewer pupils means fewer teachers. Our only hope is that the teachers will react and refuse to tick the “nationality” box.”

Émilie Rive