A primary school teacher near Toulouse has been granted official protection and taken sick leave after a parent threatened to behead her; the man was jailed for six months following a fast-track hearing six days after the incident.
The episode took place in Le Fauga, a village of about 2,600 people outside the city, and prompted colleagues at the school to stay away from work the following Monday. Toulouse education chief Karim Benmiloud said the threat came after the father had been called in by the school for a conversation about his son's conduct.
Mayor Jean-Marie Puig described how the boy had been disruptive and was sent to another classroom to calm down. In that class, a teacher is reported to have told the child to "stop acting like a little bully", and the father then waited outside the school and threatened the woman, telling her he would have cut off her head if she had been a man, the mayor said.
The parent later apologised, but a judicial complaint was filed and he appeared before the prosecutor in Toulouse. The case was processed rapidly and concluded with the six-month jail term at a Thursday hearing.
Education Minister Edouard Geffray framed the incident as an attack on the profession, saying, "No teacher should be afraid to do their job. Attacking one of them is attacking the entire institution." He also indicated the case will be among the first to trigger a decree passed in July designed to protect staff where there is a "significant risk" to their safety or health from a student's family.
Under that decree, authorities can arrange for a pupil to be transferred if staff safety is at risk, and it is understood the boy and a younger sister may be moved to a school outside Le Fauga. The episode has also reopened painful memories in France of the 2016 murder of Samuel Paty, a teacher killed outside his Paris suburb school.
Officials now face immediate tasks: apply the new protections to the teacher, decide whether to transfer the children, and manage tension in the local community as the case proceeds through the judicial and administrative routes.
