30 Euro Fine for Parents Late to School, No It’s Not a Joke

The city hall of Toulouse has decided this to penalize financially parents who come to pick up their children from the nursery late at night, that is after 6:30 pm. The latter will receive a fine of 30 euros corresponding “at the cost of the wages of the two facilitators forced to stay”specifies the note published on the dedicated website. The measure comes into force at the beginning of the school year.

The measure is already controversial. Parents of FCPE students have expressed their anger, reports 20 minutes. “ “It is an unjust, null, vexatious and probably also ineffective measure,” says Eric Pinot, the president of his department. “The city hall does not know what families are going through,” he continues. Parents who leave their children at the Clae* (recreation center) in the evening do not do it for joy, it is often also because they have to juggle complicated professional lives, and these constraints often affect the most precarious families. Why make them appear as potential delinquents, as people who get rid of their children at the expense of the community?”

For Marion Lalane-de Laubadère, the first deputy for Education, the fine affects only a few “hundreds of families out of 20,000-28,000 children welcomed every day at Clae”. “Parents who – regularly and without being able to contact them, nor contact the relatives who appear on the contact sheet – sometimes arrive an hour and a half late and are not notified”points out. 8,000 delays registered each year in Toulouse. Other cities such as Bordeaux or Strasbourg have already implemented this fine system.