A state of fear has come over my school. This is the alarming statement of Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat. In a series of messages posted on Twitter on Thursday July 8, the history and geography teacher, essayist and activist announced that she will not be returning to the school next September. And that “for the first time in 17 years”. She explained, “I have been granted, with great generosity, an educational leave that I had not thought to apply for…”. But this training would be partly due to the tensions Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat has with some of her colleagues and the unions, especially “CGT Educ’action”. “I have been the target of a relentless, politically motivated harassment campaign orchestrated by a union political commissar since last November,” the teacher denounced on her Twitter account. According to her, this harassment would have been “enabled by the passivity of the people (she) had worked with for ten years but who suddenly (found) her disruptive”.
Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat explained that it all started “with an open letter” targeting her. “Then came the request to the headmaster to order me to stop expressing myself in the media and on the networks.” The teacher is in fact a feminist essayist committed to secularism who constantly reacts to current events. She is also the author of a new book entitled “Les Nostalgériades – Nostalgie, Algérie, Jérémiades”, published last April, which refers in particular to the “difficulties teachers have in teaching about colonisation, the Algerian war or the Shoah”. Fatiha Agag-Boudjalhat is also the co-founder of the political movement Viv(r)e la République. So many engagements and initiatives that made some of her colleagues and left trade unions furious. “A disingenuous insinuation that what I allegedly said was specifically directed against my colleagues,” Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat added on Twitter. “And finally, the most vile, the dirtiest, the most mendacious: unable to rely on students and their parents, with whom I get along exceptionally well, the lynch mob got a colleague I’ve spoken to three times in four years to accuse me of harassment.” This teacher would blame “her dozens of sick days” on him and had “become quite popular after his complaint”, she said.
Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat then addressed the parents of the students in a series of tweets: “You are right to put your children in private schools where these leftist unions will not put their interests above those of your children.” The escape of parents with their children to public schools, she said, would be “managing the affairs of inflexible senior officials who enforce the dictates of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development”. “School is a free market. And public schools should only take care of the most difficult students, sorry, the ones who cause trouble. It will cost less,” she said. Finally, she denounced the training she will undergo in September, a “bonus for the U-turn in national education”, she said. “I owe my bailout only to the support of Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer. Without him, I would have been dismissed, on false charges,” she concluded.