“I want, with the Minister (of National Education Pap Ndiaye, editor’s note), to work for the start of the 2023 school year on a procedure which would ensure that, in working-class neighborhoods in any case, children have all their supplies”, said Oliver Klein.
The device, planned for in a year, would “obviously concern working-class neighborhoods, schools in REP and REP (establishments concentrating social difficulties, editor’s note), but there are also poor children in neighborhoods that are not in REP or REP so we will have to find a proposal that is fair, equitable, and that is what we are aiming to work on throughout this school year, “added the minister.
Olivier Klein, until now mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, a working-class suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, had experimented with this device in his town, where pupils in primary school have “on their table all the necessary equipment”.
“We could work on it, with the parents, with the teachers, because this kit must be defined,” he said.
This makes it possible to help families in difficulty and to ensure that “all the children have the same notebook”. “There is not the child who is going to have Hello Kitty, the one who is going to have Superman and the one who is going to have PSG on his cover,” defended the minister.
“The idea is to be able to give communities this fund to be able to buy keychains, and that each student, when he arrives in his class, finds everything he needs for the year”, specified to the AFP the entourage of Olivier Klein.
The device is envisaged “at least in primary”, the inclusion or not of the college remaining to be decided, we specify to the ministry.
The distribution of supply kits already applies in some cities. Thus in Seine-Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers has provided 4,500 sets of notebooks, pencils and diaries for elementary school students, and Bobigny will equip, like last year, some 3,900 students to get the school year off to a good start.
