Sandrine Faure, mathematics teacher at the Marcelle Rivier college in Beaumont-lès-Valence (Drôme), sent her complaint to the public prosecutor of Valence after comments by the former head of state targeting school teachers.
The pill is having difficulty passing for Sandrine Faure, 11 days after Nicolas Sarkozy's remarks made during a press conference and implicating teachers. The intervention of the former President of the Republic had nevertheless started well: “there are hundreds of thousands of competent, dedicated and wonderful teachers“It was then that the comments shocked us.”and there are teachers who choose the job for the wrong reasons. I am told that there are not enough civil servants in national education, but this is incredible demagoguery. The status of the school teacher, I don't criticize anyone, I don't want trouble with anyone, I say facts. It is 24 hours a week, six months of the year. We must tell the truth now. We can't afford a million teachers“.
A complaint for defamation
This outing provoked a lot of reactions from the teaching unions, but Sandrine Faure decided to go further by contacting the public prosecutor of Valence. This teacher is not a primary school teacher, she is a maths teacher at the Marcelle Rivier college in Beaumont-lès-Valence but she choked up when she heard Nicolas Sarkozy: “if we add all the school holidays, it turns out that it falls on the figure of four months and not six, so already this is highly exaggerated. Some will say that four months is still too much, but you should still know that out of these four months, this is precisely what I say in my complaint, there is a very very good part of this time which is a time without students, but which is not a time off, where we can prepare our lessons, where during the year we correct our copies. We have meetings with partners, so it’s an opportunity to set up school trips and educational projects. And we need that time, actually. This is not a time for us to twiddle our thumbs, where we stay home and do nothing.“.
An individual approach
Sandrine Faure is unionized. She is part of the SNES office in Drôme but she insists on the fact that this complaint for defamation with request for damages is a purely personal initiative. She does not know what will become of the letter sent by email last weekend to the public prosecutor of Valencia but according to her, this approach, symbolic as it may be, was essential. “Given, indeed, that one can file a complaint for defamation concerning homophobic remarks or racist remarks, I found that it was important, in fact. It's really of the same order, well, that's how I experienced it, anyway. I felt attacked, in fact, as a civil servant, as a teacher, and I have never been the victim of racist remarks, but I think it hurt me at least as much as what they feel on a daily basis.”. Sandrine Faure also regrets speaking out “a little late“from the Minister of National Education after Nicolas Sarkozy's remarks, Anne Genetet estimated that”teachers work a lot in sometimes very difficult conditions“Recalling in passing that”French school teachers work 30% more per year than their German counterparts.
