For Roma, school is an elusive goal
After the shantytown he was living in burned to the ground, Slavi and his siblings slept in the trunk of a car for several weeks one winter.
When police officers confiscated the car and moved them on, they did not allow the children to even retrieve their shoes.
Today, however, Slavi is lucky enough to have something that most Roma children do not: a classroom that allows him to imagine a future beyond the shacks and the frigid train station halls in which he has spent most of his 11 years.
“When I first started coming here, I didn’t really know what school was,” said Slavi, reflecting on his school, Marie Curie, in this Paris suburb. “School will help me a lot. More than anything.”
On that, most agree. But while there is consensus that public education could help integrate a Roma population that has long faced systematic discrimination, the obstacles remain formidable.
In France, schooling is mandatory between the ages of 6 and 16, but about 67 per cent of Roma children do not regularly attend school.
The reasons often have to do with a lack of stable housing or bureaucratic obstacles that advocates for the Roma, also known as Gypsies, say are deliberately heightened to keep the Roma out, perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty and marginalization.
In the case of Slavi, whose surname name is being withheld because he is a minor, the director of Marie Curie, Véronique Decker, and the school’s teachers stepped in to help after his shantytown burned down in 2014.
They found housing for the children and their families. And they demanded that the municipal government allow the Roma children who had begun their education in Bobigny to continue studying here.
The city obliged, but provided no support. So Decker and her colleagues sought funding from a foundation to subsidize the children’s daily transportation costs. With the help of government grants and charitable organizations, the teachers provided the children with school supplies and clothes.
But such compassionate intervention is exceptional — and would be unnecessary, Roma advocates say, if the state and local authorities lowered the barriers to public education for the Roma.
Champs-sur-Marne refused to include Roma children during its annual distribution of sweets and dictionaries to local children. Town hall employees also took down an exhibit on Roma life featuring pictures taken by Roma children.
The following school year, Champs-sur-Marne required Roma children to pay roughly $13 a meal for access to the school cafeteria, a price high above the $1.20 ordinarily charged to children from low-income families.
She also noted the Roma children’s poor school attendance. Pressed on the matter of evictions impairing the children’s ability to attend school, she replied that “no one has the right to settle on land that does not belong to them.”