French police will begin random searches for knives and other hidden weapons in bags in schools and their surroundings in an attempt to combat an increase in violent attacks, the Minister of Education said on Friday.
Petual searches will begin in spring, said Elisabeth Borne to the BFMTV/RMC station.
“I want us to organize, together with the Prefect, the prosecutor and the representative of the education system, regular bags of bags at the entrance of the schools,” he said.
These would be carried out by the Police, he said, since teachers and school staff are not authorized to look for students.
The new policy was driven by the stabs who became “much more common,” said Borne.
The minister said he would also seek a rule change by which any student found with a weapon with a gun at school would have to appear automatically before a disciplinary council.
Any case of this type would also trigger a notification of prosecutors, without exception.
Currently, this procedure is at the discretion of school chiefs. At the beginning of the month, a 17 -year -old high school was seriously injured in a stabbing in his school in Bagneux, a southwest suburb of Paris.
Seine-Saint-Denis, a region north of the capital with crime rates above average, this month placed around 20 intermediate and secondary schools under police surveillance, with about 100 police deployed.
The measure was to help “avoid a repetition of violent acts” after a series of incidents, authorities said.
