Teachers from Graulhet schools (Tarn) were on strike on Tuesday, one of their colleagues having been summoned by the academic inspectorate following a complaint from parents accusing her of having thrown a pen at their son. For Thomas Verdier, departmental co-secretary of the FSU-SNUipp teaching union, the incident which dates from the beginning of October and which the teacher deplores, “has taken on too significant proportions”.
While the students were heckling and throwing erasers at each other in the class, the teacher raised her voice, all the children stopped, “except one, who retorted: ‘I didn’t throw, I gave.’ She then showed him, with a supporting gesture: “Giving is like that, throwing away is like that,” and the pen bounced off the table and landed on the child’s glasses,” according to the unionist’s story. The child was not injured but his parents filed a complaint against the teacher at the Victor Hugo primary school in Graulhet.
“A clumsy gesture, without any aggression”
“She was summoned to the gendarmerie, with fingerprints and DNA taken, then by the academic inspector with an incriminating interview. She was shocked, she broke down and felt unwell when leaving the interview,” relates Thomas Verdier, who accompanied him during the interview last week. For the professor, it was “a clumsy gesture, without any aggressiveness”, “finding yourself in such a situation for a trivial event, it went too far”, believes the union representative.
On Tuesday, a widely followed strike movement in support of the teacher disrupted the operation of Graulhet schools, two of which had to close, in this small town of 13,000 inhabitants. Mobilization, adds the unionist, “is a way of expressing the fed up of teachers, which we observe in the resignations, the insufficient number of candidates for the competition”. “It’s an increasingly difficult job to do and we expect our hierarchy not to put our heads further under water,” he added.