A man has been given a six-month jail term in France after he threatened to kill a female primary school teacher who had disciplined his son at a village primary school.
He was sentenced after a fast-track hearing on Thursday, six days after the events unfolded in Le Fauga, a village with a population of about 2,600 just outside the southwestern city of Toulouse.
The teacher has been granted official protection and has gone on sick leave.
French Education Minister Edouard Geffray said: “No teacher should be afraid to do their job. Attacking one of them is attacking the entire institution.”
Over the summer, Geffray steered through a law aimed at protecting staff from a “significant risk” to their safety or health from a member of a student’s family.
The minister said this case would trigger one of the first uses of the decree.
The case revives terrible memories in France of the beheading of a teacher in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine six years ago. Samuel Paty was murdered outside his school by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee.
In Le Fauga, the teacher’s colleagues did not go into work on Monday because of what had happened the previous Friday.
The threat was made after the man had been called in for a chat with the school, according to Toulouse education chief Karim Benmiloud.
Le Fauga Mayor Jean-Marie Puig told BFMTV that the man’s son had been disruptive in class and the teacher had sent him to another class to calm down, although he continued to misbehave.
The teacher in this class was alleged to have told the child to “stop acting like a little bully”, BFMTV reports.
She was then threatened by the father, who according to the mayor had waited for her “outside the school and apparently threatened to cut off her head if she’d been a man”.
The parent subsequently apologised, however a judicial complaint was made and he went before the prosecutor in Toulouse on Thursday afternoon.
The decree passed in July allows for a student to be transferred to another school in a case involving significant risk to staff, and where education authorities have intervened.
It is thought the boy and a younger sister may now be moved to another school outside Le Fauga.
