METAESC: With 845 schools closed due to a severe heatwave, French parents are applying whitewash to windows and buying fans themselves to protect students from sweltering classrooms.
As a brutal and unrelenting heatwave—the second to strike France in 2026—forces the closure of 845 primary and middle schools this Monday, June 22, thousands of other establishments remain open under grueling learning conditions. Faced with inaction or delayed official responses, parents across the country are taking matters into their own hands resorting to makeshift solutions to shield children from oppressive heat.
A Whitewash Crusade Sweeps the Nation
In a grassroots movement gaining traction from Normandy to the Atlantic coast, parent volunteers are reviving an old-fashioned technique: applying Blanc de Meudon, a natural white mineral powder, to classroom windows. The chalky coating acts as a reflective barrier, significantly reducing the greenhouse effect inside sun-exposed rooms.
In the small Manche commune of Isigny-le-Buat, volunteers mobilized last week to coat the windows of the local elementary and nursery schools, local outlet La Manche libre reported. Similar operations unfolded in Paris’s 11th arrondissement and at the Marie-Anne du Boccage nursery school in Nantes, according to Le Parisien.
“Many of us parents are furious. We’ve been sounding the alarm for years, asking the town hall to buy fans and equip the buildings,” Amélie Le Provost, a member of the Nantes parent collective “35°C at School” and mother of three, told the newspaper. “We’re carrying out Blanc de Meudon operations, coating the windows with this white powder that protects from the sun. It’s the only thing we can do.”
In Nantes, the situation has become critical enough that all 142 public schools will close during afternoons on Monday and Tuesday, with limited childcare services maintained at four designated sites.
Parents Buy Fans as Official Orders Lag
The same urgency echoed in Bougival, in the Yvelines department. “The town hall informed us last Thursday that they had placed an order for fans, but they still haven’t been delivered, and meanwhile, it’s 34 or 35 degrees in the classrooms,” a parent Le Parisien. “We couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.”
During the previous heatwave in May, representatives at the Alphonse-de-Lamartine school in Saint-Nazaire dipped into the secular association’s communal fund to urgently buy 14 fans—one per classroom—on Tuesday, May 26, Ouest-France reported at the time.
Makeshift Measures Meet Official Resistance
However, the path of DIY intervention is fraught with obstacles. External purchases are not always welcome, as parents discovered at the Damesme school in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, where the headteacher turned them away.
“We are strictly forbidden from introducing electrical devices not supplied by the city. If an accident involving a student or an adult, or a fire, were to occur because of this device, we would be held responsible,” she argued to Le Parisien.
Some municipalities have proactively stepped in. In Vitré, Ille-et-Vilaine, the city “equipped every school with fans and misters,” and municipal agents applied shading paint—the very Blanc de Meudon that parent collectives elsewhere are spreading themselves—to the windows, Ouest-France noted.
As the heatwave persists and red vigilance alerts remain in place, the patchwork of parental resourcefulness and uneven official responses underscores a growing strain on France’s school infrastructure in an era of increasingly extreme temperatures.
