Anger of high school students: Where are the 3,000 replacement teachers announced as reinforcements?

The mobilization continues this Tuesday for high school students throughout France where some 200 schools should be closed according to the Ministry of Education. A “decline compared to previous weeks”, while high school students are demanding a 10 billion euro plan for high schools.

Accustomed to overcrowded classes and repeated absences, young people are demanding, among other things, more teachers in schools. In response, the government announced at the end of the week the emergency deployment of 3,024 replacement teachers in high schools where the situation is most critical. Where are they today?

Of “23 out of 30 academies”, “since Friday, 35% of the replacements who were available have already been assigned”, “and we have recruited around a hundred additional people”, detailed this Tuesday Edouard Geffray, the Minister of National Education.

“The TZRs are not pawns”

These replacement teachers are “essentially TZRs”, tenured teachers in a replacement zone, explained the Minister of Higher Education Philippe Baptiste on France Info last week, refuting any “tinkering”. “But where do they come from? » quips the National Union of Secondary Education (SNES-FSU) while the replacements seem to have come out of the hat.

The TZRs, “when they do not have an assignment, are in their administrative establishment, where they carry out activities of an educational nature in their discipline while awaiting an assignment order for a replacement,” recalls the union.

But representatives of secondary education fear the excesses of these emergency replacements and in particular of assignments “outside the recruitment discipline” or outside the replacement zone of incumbents. “The TZRs are not pawns that the administration can move according to its desires but also its failings,” insists the SNES-FSU.

For his part, Édouard Geffray affirmed that high school students could “obviously continue to express themselves” by demonstrating, “that is their strictest right […] on the other hand, my deep aspiration is that everyone can return to class in front of their teachers”.