Traveling to Bordeaux, this Friday March 29, the Minister of National Education, Nicole Belloubet, announced the establishment of a “mobile school force” to ensure the security of establishments. The announcement comes after the principal of Maurice-Ravel high school resigned in the face of death threats he received.
Since the tragedies of the murder of Samuel Paty, a professor murdered in 2020 for having shown caricatures of Mohammed to his class, then, three years later, that of Dominique Bernard, professor of literature, murdered by an Islamist, the threats of death are enough to chill the blood of those who still receive them.
The latest case of threats to hit the headlines led the principal of the Maurice-Ravel high school, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, to resign for his safety. He had asked a young girl to remove her veil. The teenager had filed a complaint, which has now been closed. But the media coverage of this affair triggered a barrage of insults and death threats against the director of the establishment. “These events particularly marked and hurt him,” his lawyer confided, Thursday March 28, to Parisianaffirming that the affair plunged his client into “great anxiety”.
With you, teachers and heads of establishments, in Bordeaux.
If our School holds up and does not back down, it is thanks to you.
Faced with threats, the State is at your side and will never abandon you. Everything is done to guarantee your safety and that of the establishments. pic.twitter.com/cxOXw41Mun
— Nicole Belloubet (@NBelloubet) March 29, 2024
Guarantee physical and legal security
Faced with this context of insecurity, this Friday March 29, the Minister of Education Nicole Belloubet, traveling to Bordeaux, announced her plan to deploy “a mobile school security force which will be national”, reports The Parisian. This unit will be intended “to reassure teachers” and “to ensure physical security” within establishments. It “will have a security mission inside the establishment, calming and education”.
The minister also underlined her wish to guarantee “legal certainty” to establishment staff. In the Maurice-Ravel high school affair, the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, announced that the State would file a complaint against the student for “slanderous denunciation”. From now on, this will be automatic. “The State will systematically take civil action when a complaint is filed”, when there are “acts of cyber-maliciousness or acts of physical attacks” against educational establishments, indicated Nicole Belloubet.