Near Toulouse, reintegration via ecological transition

On this spring Friday in Lahage (Haute-Garonne), around fifteen students aged 16 to 25, dropped off by shuttle from the nearest station, head towards the small meadow where their construction site is located: a circular cabin of approximately 3 meters in diameter in recycled wood.

It remains to complete the wall sections, then install the roof, designed by guest artist Michaël Feneux using dozens of diamonds.

Divided into three groups, which will rotate throughout the morning, the apprentice carpenters therefore set about making these diamonds, helping out in the kitchen to prepare lunch, and preparing the bent bolts they need to fix the circular framework.

Thomas Ensinas, 22, leans on his pliers to twist the bolts, immobilized in a vice, to the appropriate angle. Long hair, still sparse beard, the shy young man has been in trouble with school for a long time.

As a child, he felt a lot of “pressure” there and admitted to his parents: “School stresses me out a bit.”

It was then decided to take him out of school and educate him at home. “But I started to drop out too. Maths wasn’t really my thing. But that doesn’t stop me from being here, from working,” he smiles.

"Scary"

Here, it is this third place nestled on a gently sloping hill which, in addition to the ETRE school, also hosts a craft brewery, a thrift/recycling store and an educational farm.

The school is an offshoot of the 3PA association ("Think, speak, share, act"), founded in 2004 by four educators from disadvantaged neighborhoods who started from the observation that young people did not feel concerned by climate change.

"They said 'It's very scary, it's very anxiety-inducing, all these questions, but we have priorities: fill our fridge, find training, a job...+', remembers one of the four founders, Frédérick Mathis, 42 years old.

So, rather than sticking to theory, the association decided to take the target audience "to the countryside to practice this ecology, to put their hands concretely in the earth", he says.

After years of experimentation, the ETRE school was created in 2017, and now welcomes around 80 trainees each year, thanks in particular to subsidies from the Occitanie region.

It offers three training courses: a one-week “remobilization” aimed at discovering the professions of ecological transition and formulating a project, a three-month “requalification” where the trainees touch on everything, from carpentry to organic market gardening, as well as than a diploma (professional title) over ten months as a carpenter and fitter in the circular economy, using recycled materials.

“College, you have to be ready”

Alice Barberousse, 23, works hard to assemble the diamonds that will form the roof.

After cutting to the appropriate dimensions, under the supervision of supervisors, the recovered wood from pallets used to deliver solar panels in the region, she assembles everything with heavy blows of a screwdriver, on workbenches installed outside. .

The smiling young woman with short hair and arms dotted with tattoos, had first started a degree in archeology and art history.

“It was extremely interesting, but there you go, the pace of college, you have to be ready, you have to be a little mature academically. And I wasn't at all,” she confides. “So I dropped out of college and started working.”

Kitchen assistant, saleswoman, she then does odd jobs, but does not see herself continuing on this path. Interested in carpentry, she therefore turned to the ETRE school, where she is completing her “requalification” this Friday.

A sign of the success of these training courses, ecological transition schools are flourishing almost everywhere in France. There are already around twenty of them and around ten others are preparing to open.

We learn about renewable energies in Paris, organic market gardening in Alénya (Pyrénées-Orientales), near Perpignan, and even mountain professions in Grenoble.