Nice Kindergarten Staff Begin Mandatory Nine-Hour Daily Playground Patrols as Municipal Authorities Expand Security Drill
Following an attack on a kindergarten director and teacher in Nice, the city council has ordered every staff member to conduct hourly playground rounds, a measure officials say will continue indefinitely.
The municipal authorities of Nice have ordered all staff at the Clément-Roassal maternelle to conduct a continuous perimeter patrol of the school grounds, lasting nine hours a day, beginning this week. The measure follows the attack on the school’s director and a teacher on Monday 2 November, after which the city’s education department concluded that the existing security arrangements had been, in its words, «insufficiently thorough».
Under the new regime, the director and her colleagues walk the fence line in shifts of forty-minute circuits, logging each pass in a chalk register kept at the gate. Teachers have been issued regulation high-visibility vests and whistles, and the school’s canteen has been moved to a cordoned area so that lunch breaks can be supervised from the entrance. Parents collecting children are asked to wait behind a painted line that now runs the full length of the pavement.
A spokesperson for the rectorate said the arrangement would be reviewed in the spring, though officials acknowledged it could be extended to the city’s other forty-two nursery schools by the end of the month. «We are asking our educators to protect the perimeter as thoroughly as they protect the children inside it,» the spokesperson said. «Those are not separate responsibilities.»
Staff have described the first week as exhausting. One teacher, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the patrols had replaced lesson planning entirely, and that the children now greet her each morning by asking whether she has completed her rounds.
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