Faced with the lack of care next year for his 12-year-old son with autism, Georgio Loiseau, mayor of Poses (Eure) and president of the association L'Oiseau bleu, began a hunger-strike. Its objective: to denounce the absence of a solution adapted to children with disabilities and the impact on families left without support. He answered questions from the Point.
Le Point: What is your son's situation?
Georgio Loiseau: My autistic son finds himself without a solution at the end of the school year, when he is about to turn 12 and needs adapted, individualized and global care. He has nothing left: he has reached the end of the elementary cycle and there is no place in a medical-educational institute (IME) to welcome him. The Institutes I have contacted tell me between two and six years of waiting. One establishment even told us that it was 45th on the waiting list, which equals fifteen years of waiting.
It is a very long deschooling that is looming, with colossal losses of learning. We won't be able to stimulate him enough if he stays at home, and he needs to be socialized because one of the problems with autism is social relationships. He's going to be deprived of it, and that's not acceptable. The ordinary college is not an acceptable solution either: even accompanied by an AESH, it is far too far in learning and needs a protected environment.
How have you been doing so far?
I have created a school for him, but it cannot support him at the college level. He is not the only one in this situation: families whose children reach the end of the cycle have no support. However, I did not create this school to put families in difficulty... I am president of an association, L'Oiseau bleu, and I meet many families who are in the same situation as me, in Eure and in Seine Maritime.
All the students in my son's school suffer, like him, from intellectual difficulties and they cannot be accommodated in the regular school system. Without a solution, they return home and follow the Cned courses, which we are presented with as a miracle solution, when in fact they are losing what they have learned and are no longer sufficiently stimulated.
The presence of a severe disability already has a real impact in homes and can cause couples to explode, but the lack of care also forces one of the parents to stop working. However, we too need to work, to have a social life and to have an ordinary family life. It's even worse for single parents: they have to live on social minima and plunge into poverty.
What is the purpose of this hunger strike? What do you expect from government?
I want to use my situation to relay those of other families in order to denounce the lack of places in the medico-social environment, the institutional mistreatment suffered by families and young people without a solution, whether they are children or young adults.
Since the start of my hunger strike, I have noticed that this is a national problem: I have received a thousand testimonials of support, from all over France, but also from Tahiti, Reunion, from Martinique, and even from Switzerland and Belgium. Everyone encourages me and tells me that the situation is the same for them too.
Being elected, and mayor at that, is a real catalyst: I hope it will help to ensure that the message is correctly relayed and that the public authorities will be able to listen to me.
I am waiting for a lasting solution for my son, and I also have thorny situations of families in a situation of violence to submit to the ARS.
It is time to implement more proactive policies, and for the State to finally listen to caregivers. I am tired and angry to have to come to this: I am an elected official, very attached to the values of the Republic, and I am obliged to publicly denounce the failures of the State even though I am one of its representatives. What a pity !
