This is a measure that will avoid imposing a change on the victim… A student responsible for school harassment can now be transferred to another school, according to a decree published this Thursday, August 17, which also provides for the possibility of being able to sanction a perpetrator of cyberbullying against a student from another establishment.
“When the intentional and repeated behavior of a pupil poses a characterized risk to the safety or health of another pupil of the school, the school principal, after having brought together the educational team, implements, by associating the parents of the pupil whose behavior is in question, any educational measure likely to put an end to this behavior”, indicates this text.
“If, despite the implementation of the measures mentioned […]the behavior of the pupil persists, the academic director of the national education services, seized by the director of the school, can ask the mayor to proceed with the removal of this pupil from the school and his registration in another school in the town”, he continues.
Harassment, a national priority
Believing that the response to school harassment must be “relentless”, the new Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal has already mentioned this measure several times, announced by his predecessor Pap Ndiaye in the spring, when school harassment was erected a national priority after the suicide in May of Lindsay, 13, in Pas-de-Calais.
In colleges and high schools, the decree extends “the scope of the disciplinary procedure to cases in which students commit acts of harassment against students located in another establishment”, specifies the text, a measure also announced by Gabriel Attal.
Zero tolerance
Visiting Reunion on Wednesday and Thursday on the occasion of the start of the school year, which takes place there on Thursday for students, the minister affirms, in an interview with the Quotidien de la Réunion et de l’Océan Indien published on Wednesday, that he wants a “zero tolerance against all forms of harassment”.
In another interview published Thursday in Le Journal de l’île de La Réunion, he points out that “isolating the student, in general, solves the problem”. “It is not possible in the first degree. My decree will remedy it”.
For acts undermining the values of the Republic or the principle of secularism, the decree specifies that the head of the establishment “is required to initiate a disciplinary procedure” and can also “ask the academic director of the national education services to designate […] a competent person in this field to sit in an advisory capacity on the Disciplinary Board”.