English teacher absent for a month near Lyon: justice orders the arrival of a replacement within five days

The Lyon administrative court ordered the rectorate to replace a middle school teacher who had been absent for a month, in a decision presented Thursday by a group of parents as a “reversal of jurisprudence” influenced by the high school movement.

Seized by the parents of a 3rd grade student at a college in Saint-Priest, in the suburbs of Lyon, the summary judge on October 8 ordered the rector of the academy “to replace” within five days an English teacher “absent for almost a month”. In his order, the magistrate considers that “the emergency condition” is “met”.

The replacement arrived on Monday, told AFP Me Joyce Pitcher, lawyer for the parents' collective OnVeutDesProfs which brought this procedure. Substantive appeals to obtain compensation in the event of a teacher's prolonged absence are often won by parents, she notes. The State has just been ordered to pay 1,200 euros to the family of a schoolboy from Vendée in “reparation for educational damage”.

But interim injunctions to obtain an emergency replacement are rarer. And hitherto unpublished in Lyon, “where the 25 that I introduced in recent years were all rejected,” assures Me Pitcher. Created in 2022 by dissatisfied parents, the OnVeutDesProfs collective welcomes in a press release “a reversal of jurisprudence” from the Lyon administrative court.

Assuring that the Minister of National Education Édouard Geffray promises “a response ‘within eight days’ to each private teacher’s high school”, he calls on his website for parents to contact the administrative courts “for each absence not replaced within eight days”. “We are taking the minister at his word, with the aim of forcing the State to take structural measures so that there is a teacher in front of each student, as the minister has committed to doing,” notes Mr. Pitcher.

The decision of the Lyon administrative court “is a victory for the movement of high school students”, who are demanding the replacement of their absent teachers as a priority, the lawyer boasts. OnVeutdesProfs believes that the “emergency plan” for replacing teachers presented by Édouard Geffray on October 8, with 3,000 replacements assigned, is only an “announcement effect”, since it is the “usual pool of tenured teachers intended to provide replacements”.