Hundreds of people walked Saturday, October 5, in Pantin, in honor of Christine Renon, who committed suicide in his school after denouncing in a letter his working conditions.
At the head of this silent march, Christine Renon's family and the principals of Pantin moved forward, holding their arms. Many wore a black armband.
Behind them, teachers and parents of students, some with their children. On a sign, a woman, a bouquet of white roses around her neck, had written: "to die for her ideas, to die of love too much, I am Christine".
"She was laughing all the time, she was joking all the time and the kids loved her," said Séverine, a kindergarten teacher who worked in partnership with Christine Renon.
"She was solar, had a lot of energy, she was very committed to her job, I would never have imagined she could do something like that," she added.
"She was an activist, she was outraged by the situation of schools," continued Agnès, also a kindergarten teacher in this city of Seine-Saint-Denis.
Two moms, in tears, evoked "his eternal blue polar, his humor, the attention paid to each one, the supplies bought with his own money".
Several politicians also took part in the march, including MEP Yannick Jadot EELV, came in "tribute to a profession today suffering".
"At the time, there were many more ways, it can not continue like that," said the MEP, whose father was a school principal.
"School swallowed you up"
The procession, party of the town hall of Pantin, arrived at the end of the morning at the maternal school Méhul, where the body of this woman of 58 years was found Monday, September 23 at dawn.
Just before killing herself, the director had sent a letter to thirty of her colleagues in which she detailed "her exhaustion", the loneliness of the directors, the accumulation of "time-consuming" tasks, incessant and contradictory reforms.
"This letter is like a torch," said Caroline Marchand of SNUipp-FSU.
"You were neither fragile nor depressed," she added to the podium in the schoolyard of Méhul, packed to the ground. "You will leave the image of a committed director, so committed that the school has engulfed you, submerged."
A director then drew up the endless list of administrative tasks, protocols and acronyms imposed by the National Education Ministry. "The best tribute we can give him is to continue to fight for our students," in a department that combines the difficulties, she said, long applauded by the protesters.
The death of Christine Renon led to a strong mobilization of the educational community. Thursday, nearly a quarter of the staff of the academy of Creteil, on which depends Pantin, were on strike. Between 1,100 and 3,000 people gathered in Bobigny and thousands more across France to demand political responses to this desperate move.
Thursday, the Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer said he was "ready" to discuss the status of school heads. He proposed the creation of a "monitoring committee" involving unions and professionals to "change" their status.
With AFP