(Reuters) Last year, Sihame Denguir enrolled her teenage son and daughter in France’s largest Muslim private school, in the northern city of Lille some 200 kilometres (125 miles) from their middle-class suburban Parisian home.
The move meant financial sacrifices. Denguir, 41, now pays fees at the partially state-subsidised Averroes school and rents a flat in Lille for her children and their grandmother, who moved to care for them.
But Averroes’ academic record, among the best in France, was a powerful draw.
So she was dumbstruck in December when the school lost government funding worth around two million euros a year on grounds it failed to comply with secular principles enshrined in France’s national education guidelines.
