Stun grenade blows off schoolboy's hand as France's school protests turn violent

PARIS — The French state's answer to schoolchildren demanding classrooms has become the stun grenade. A 15-year-old student lost his hand on Monday in the northern town of Lens after picking up a police stun grenade that exploded in his grasp, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais, François-Xavier Lauch, told reporters. The boy, a pupil at Behal high school, also suffered arm injuries. An investigation has been opened, local outlet La Voix du Nord reported. The maiming of a child is the grimmest moment yet in a protest movement that began on September 17 in the Paris region and has since swept France. Pupils took to the streets over dilapidated school buildings, teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and punishing school days. They have shared footage of rats and cockroaches in classrooms, leaking ceilings, collapsed roofs and battered furniture — the physical decay of a public education system starved of funds. Their placards declared: "Education is a right, not a privilege." What the state offered in return was force. Education Minister Édouard Geffray announced that up to 500 of France's roughly 3,700 lycées would be fully or partially closed on Monday — a staggering admission that schools can no longer be kept open. The ministry says 24 schools have been burned or ransacked since the protests began, and 78 education staff have been injured. More than 5,000 people have been arrested, around 85 per cent of them minors in the Paris region, according to the interior minister. Over 170 pupils and 300 police officers have been injured in the past week alone. On Monday morning, teachers and pupils were trapped inside the Vauquelin High School in Paris after it was set alight; around 100 pupils had to be rescued as firefighters were pelted with fireworks. Geffray claimed "far-left activists" had infiltrated and hijacked a legitimate student movement — the familiar script of a government that cannot admit the grievance is real. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing France Unbowed, denounced the "savagery" of police using tear gas and batons against crowds of children and urged supporters to place themselves between protesting pupils and the police. Rights groups have raised the alarm about the policing of demonstrations overwhelmingly made up of minors. France's school crisis did not arrive overnight. Years of austerity hollowed out staffing and maintenance while governments of every stripe treated education budgets as an adjustment variable. Now children who asked for teachers are met with grenades, and ministers who cannot fix a ceiling lecture the young about violence. A 15-year-old will never write with that hand again. The Republic owes him more than an investigation — it owes him, and every child in those crumbling classrooms, the schools it promised.