The number of Ukrainian refugees arriving on French soil has tripled in the last week. For those who plan on staying, Paris is setting up a special scheme to integrate Ukrainian refugee children in the French school system, reports FRANCE 24.
“The other day, a mother came in with her baby. It was so small it looked like a newborn. [The mum] wouldn’t stop crying. It broke my heart,” says Odette, a caretaker at the École Polyvalente Eva Kotchever, a kindergarten and primary school in the 18th arrondissement (district) of Paris.
Odette was on vacation when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, and only discovered the news upon her return. “I got a phone call on Saturday morning from the school. They filled me in on what was happening and told me that we had become an emergency reception centre of sorts,” she explains.
The school has been taking in refugee families since March 10th, offering them some respite after long, stressful journeys fleeing the horrors of the war in Ukraine, where their menfolk of fighting age still remain to defend their homeland.
Most of them arrive from the reception centre next door that was set up on March 3 specifically for Ukrainian refugees by France Terre d’Asile, an NGO helping asylum seekers. There, they can get a meal, begin their asylum-seeking process, find temporary housing and see a doctor, from 9am to 6pm.
With only one common play area for children, many refugee parents (mostly mothers) struggle to deal with the administrative procedures while having to care for their young ones. Called up by the City Hall for help, the school freed up three classrooms and a heap of toys to offer relief.
Pushing past the school’s glass doors, a teacher walks through a short corridor with a reception desk to the left. Odette is the first point of contact and asks visitors to sign in with their information before entering the halls of the École Polyvalente Eva Kotchever.
To the right of the corridor, a cement wall is embellished with children’s drawings, and arrows in the blue-and-yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag indicating the way to the first floor. “Most families and children don’t speak French, so we’ve put up arrows to guide them to the designated classrooms,” Odette says.
Families are never left unaccompanied. They are escorted from the next door reception centre by city hall facilitators who work for organisations like DASCO (“direction des affaires scolaires” or “direction of school affairs”), in charge of welcoming new pupils across Paris.
“For now, we are just helping out and offering up our classrooms to children so that their parents can do what they need,” says Christine Serra, the school’s principal. “The teachers don’t really come into contact with the children. Things are still quite separated at the moment. The children aren’t integrated in the French classrooms, they don’t interact with the pupils.”