In France, nearly three weeks after the start of the school year, several thousand students are still on the streets. On the eve of the resumption of classes, UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, counted 2,043 minors without accommodation, compared to 1,990 at the same time. A situation that UNICEF acknowledges is underestimated, since only children whose parents have applied for emergency accommodation and have not received anything are counted. Therefore, excluded from this calculation are families who live in squats, shanty towns or who have stopped applying for accommodation due to lack of a positive response.
In Lyon, the third largest city Francethe families of about twenty children found no other solution than to sleep in the school of one of their children, nine establishments occupied in all, thanks to the intervention of a collective. At the time when the parents come to pick up their children from school, those of Mariam, five years old, join her to spend the night there. I sleep in the music room because we don’t have a house “, explains the little Georgian girl who proudly guides us through the corridors of this school, which has also been her refuge for eight months. A few chairs, a table against a wall and a large blackboard. It takes imagination to no longer see a classroom, but a child’s bedroom. Like every evening, the family must, before that, retrieve from the gymnasium what will serve as a bed.
Even if the situation is tolerated by the town hall, the family must keep a low profile. Every morning at 7:20 they must have vacated the school so that there is no suspicion of their trace, everything must be in the state in which they found it. ” explains Alexandra Grasset, a mother who accompanies them.
A discretion which suits young Mariam well, whose classmates are not aware of it. They don’t know. They ask questions: “where were you sleeping?” I don’t want to answer him because I’m afraid “, confides the little girl, who admits to fearing mockery. However, she is far from being the only one to have slept in these premises.
Also listen toDozens of homeless families camp in front of the town hall of the 18th arrondissement of Paris
For several years, parents and teachers from the establishment have been involved in the collective Never without a roof organize to accommodate families of students in the school. Every beginning of the year, we have children that we identify thanks to their address, because it is a postal address or because the mothers talk about it to the teachers who alert us and then we try to find solutions. Very often, the solution is to occupy a school for these families to shelter them. »
Without this solution, Mariam and her parents would be living on the streets. Denied their right to asylum, they had to leave a shelter nine months ago. Since then, their daily calls to 115, the emergency accommodation platform, have been in vain. We had to sleep in our car for almost a monthsays the father. But Mariam couldn’t rest. A car is too small for three people. She was nervous all the time. She cried every day. Whereas now we have at least seven rooms, mattresses, we can sleep like humans. She is calmer now, easier. »
An improvement in her condition that is felt in class. Mariam is progressing well, she who had fallen asleep on a small school desk during the first meeting between her parents and her teacher.
Also listen to2024 Olympics: French NGOs concerned about the disappearance of 3,000 places in the Samu social