Wednesday, in the early morning, Jeanne (1), a final year student, goes to her high school in Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais). The young girl is about to pass, at 2 p.m., her first test – that of specialty – of the baccalaureate. Inside the Alexandre-Ribot high school, Jeanne is stopped by the school’s management. The girl would have an outfit “indecent”, according to the headmaster Alain Prévost.
Specifically, she wears mini-shorts, fishnet tights with holes, a crop-top – the t-shirts revealing the navel – and a denim jacket, reports the voice of the North. Clothing that management describes as “contrary to the rules of procedure”, which states that “students must wear appropriate clothing compatible with community life”.
As the time of the test approaches, the teenager must make a detour to the principal’s office. He then asks her to “to change”, she says, and immediately calls her parents to bring her more appropriate clothes. For her, her outfit has no “nothing extravagant” and matches her usual look. For her, “the management goes after the students with the original styles”.
Thirty minutes before the exam, Jeanne complies with the instructions and hastily changed in the school toilets. She does not take off. “She then made quite inappropriate remarks”, accuses the principal, who ends up threatening her with “additional penalties”, even a “Disciplinary Board”. “She is often provocative, he justifies himself. I can’t allow trouble to be created in the establishment for an inappropriate outfit. The regulations exist, I am there to enforce them, but at no time did I threaten her with not being able to pass her baccalaureate test. And specifies that Jeanne is not on her first call to order. But this is the first time that management has forced him to change. The next day, the high school student presented herself in front of the gates of the establishment in pants, reports the voice of the North.
The regional daily recalls that in September 2020, the students of Ribot had mobilized to support their comrades from the Branly high school in Boulogne-sur-Mer. They had been subjected to sexist reflections because their clothes were supposedly “too short”.