A collective of parents and teachers called on Monday for requests from schools in Toulouse to accommodate several students and their families without a solution for accommodation. He condemns them for being thrown out onto the street by state services this summer.
Parents and teachers decided to act. The collective “Never without my roof in my school” just announced on Monday evening the request of several schools in Toulouse to house homeless families. “Since the beginning of the summer, everywhere in France, prefects have ordered the expulsion of emergency accommodation, completely illegal, even though the right to accommodation is unconditional (…) We can no longer accept that “once you pass the school door, there is a street waiting for certain families”, the members explain of collectives who call for a gathering on Monday at 6 pm in Jean-Jaurès.
Since the beginning of the September school year, several schools, including Didier Daurat, Littré, Jean Zay and Calas-Dupont, have stepped up actions to alert public authorities to the cases of numerous students and their families without housing solutions. Fabre Elementary School in Les Carmes is sounding the alarm. “I have been a parent delegate for three years now and every time we go back to school, we mobilize to express our rejection of this situation,” explains Judith Haffner. The three children who attend the institution are currently living in different squats in the city, in great insecurity. This is the case of a girl CE2 who arrived from Algeria two years ago with her parents, brother and sister. This family is one of the homeless people who occupied the Saint-Sernin high school during the winter of 2021 before being rehoused in a hotel in Muret until last August. On the street since this summer, she found refuge in an abandoned building in the Bonnefoy neighborhood.
A life of wandering
“A few days ago, the bailiff came. We risk being deported. I don’t want to put my kids through this. I am often asked why we don’t return to our country of origin. It hurts. If you ask a Frenchman why he goes to Algeria,” Zohra explains in perfect French. This former sports teacher, part of whose family has been living in Tarn for several years, struggles every day to “find a home” for her children and enable them, especially the two oldest, to continue their education, one a hairdresser, the other a saddler. .
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Two other families of Albanian origin testify to their difficulties. One of them, arrived in France in July 2022, lived for more than four months in a tent in Balma-Gramont. Placed in a shelter in Roseraie, then in a hotel in Muret, she learned from the prefecture that she had been returned to the street during the summer. Since then, she has joined a squat located in a former nursing home in Colomiers where around forty families took refuge after their camp located on the banks of the Garonne, in Empalot, was dissolved a year ago. “In this life full of wandering, school is often the only support for children, an encouraging place in a life that is not that,” emphasizes Catherine Camier, principal of the Fabre elementary school. According to the figures of the association and collective “Never without a roof in my school”, 330 children and their families are currently homeless in Haute-Garonne and mainly in Toulouse.