Angry high school students set bins ablaze and blocked roads to protest overcrowded classrooms, shortage of teachers and dilapidated facilities across France on Thursday.
No fewer than 65 teachers have been injured or assaulted during the demonstrations while 400 schools shut down on Friday amid the crisis.
The police arrested nearly 2,000 protesters at the lycées, largely teenagers, after the protests turned violent with some students targeting police lines with fireworks.
Hundreds of protesters surrounded a firetruck at Saint-Exupery high school and put the firefighters to flight. They had been deployed to extinguish the fires in the school.
Students lamented deplorable learning conditions.
“There are 35 of us per classroom. With 35 degrees Celsius in summer, it’s unbearable. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms,” AFP cited Raphael, a 17-year-old based in Strasbourg who withheld his surname for fear of reprisals, as saying.
“The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors,” he added.
A younger female student in Pantin voiced similar concerns.
“We are 35 per class, we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms, the one hour lunch break (is too short) for everyone to get food,” Reuters cited Kesia, 15, as saying.
France’s justice minister, Gerald Darmanin, said what was supposed to be students protest escalated into public disturbance.
“We have gone from high-school student demonstrations to a public order disturbance,” Mr Darmanin said.
