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This article examines how high school principals in France work to change the negative effects that the country's academic tracking system brings to students from immigrant and working-class backgrounds. The tracking system tends to relegate these students to lower vocational tracks that do not prepare them well for the labor market and tend to reinforce their social marginalization. The authors—one a sociologist and the other a school principal—describe a comprehensive, diverse lycée in a suburb of Paris where administrators are addressing the multiple impacts of tracking on their students by enabling some to change tracks and providing others the support they need to succeed when facing challenges at school and in their neighborhoods. The description and analysis of daily life at school not only illuminates what is distinctive about the French system but also lays out strategies and practices that make the school environment more egalitarian.

Ultraviolet (UV)-based devices have shown their effectiveness on various germicidal purposes. To serve their design optimisation, the disinfection effectiveness of a vertically cylindrical UV lamp, whose wattage ranges from P = 30 − 100 W, is numerically investigated in this work. The UV radiation is solved by the Finite Volume Method together with the Discrete Ordinates model. Various results for the UV intensity and its bactericidal effects against several popular virus types, i.e., Corona-SARS, Herpes (type 2), and HIV, are reported and analysed in detail. Results show that the UV irradiance is greatly dependent on the lamp power. Additionally, it is indicated that the higher the lamp wattage employed, the larger the bactericidal rate is observed, resulting in the greater effectiveness of the UV disinfection process. Nevertheless, the wattage of P ≤ 100W is determined to be insufficient for an effective disinfection performance in a whole room; higher values of power must hence be considered in case intensive sterilization is required. Furthermore, the germicidal effect gets reduced with the viruses less sensitive to UV rays, e.g, the bactericidal rate against the HIV virus is only ∼8.98% at the surrounding walls.