Head of $65K-per-year NYC school fired longtime French teacher after answer about France’s hijab ban made her daughter cry: suit

Maybe it was lost in translation.

A longtime French teacher claims the Upper East Side’s elite, all-girls Spence School fired her for giving a straightforward answer about France’s controversial hijab law — which triggered the principal’s daughter so much she cried in class.

Her comments were accused of being sympathetic to the ban and Islamophobic by the school, which allegedly denied her any due process, despite years of praise for her advanced language classes, a new lawsuit claims.

“It’s Orwellian,” Anne Protopappas, a celebrated educator who had taught at the prestigious $65,000 a year school since 1999, told The Post.

Now, at 62, she’s been unable to find a new job after being sacked by the storied 132-year-old school, which boasts prestigious alumni such as Madeleine Astor, Gwyneth Paltrow, along with the children of figures such as Henry Clay Frick, Mick Jagger and Michael Bloomberg.

“So you teach the daughter of the head of the school, and then you can’t teach anymore?” Protopappas said. “You don’t just destroy people — like now, I have nothing. No livelihood, nothing.”

Protopappas says that she was viewed by students and parents — many of whom attended her special “Salon” classes open to the public — as a “quintessential Spence teacher” who valued “truth” and students, believing the school’s motto of “not for school but for life we learn.”

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“You can’t have a faculty that is terrorized if you really want to teach those skills to the young minds,” she said. “And we almost switched from a culture of humility to a culture of insecurity.”

The incident took place in May 2023, when the daughter of the new Head of School, Felicia Wilks , asked a question about France’s so-called “hijab law,” according to court papers.

Wilks was brought in as head of school just a year earlier , as the Spence School grappled with a number of racial dust-ups, including an earlier lawsuit over the administration’s alleged defamation of a student in 2018 and another controversy involving the previous head of school.

After thanking the young Wilks for her curiosity, “I responded and connected it to the curriculum,” Protopappas said, highlighting how the law came to be from a French perspective.

But the thorough explanation was met with an “intensely personal and emotional reaction that was hard for her to really control,” including about a West Coast friend who started wearing a hijab recently.

“She was in a lot of pain,” Protopappas said.

The longtime teacher even congratulated her West Coast friend on her decision to wear a hijab.

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“She was furious, and kept talking about her friend,” Protopappas said. “I was shaken, I had never seen anything like that in my 40 years of teaching.”

France has long had restrictions on wearing religious symbols deemed “ostentatious” in school, including Christian crosses and yarmulkes, in addition to Muslim head wear.

In 2022, they also banned women from wearing a hijab while competing in sports, a law that they relaxed for athletes at last month’s Paris Olympics. Last year, the nation specifically banned robe-like abayas in schools . Both moves were met with strong opposition in the European nation and internationally.

French supporters of the bans say that wearing showy religious articles in school goes against the Republic’s tradition of secularism, or “laicite,” in public spaces. Critics, such as Amnesty International , have said that secularism is no excuse to bar people from religious expression.

The next day — the last day of school for seniors — the young Wilks “expressed even more anger, as if she had been inflamed,” the lawsuit states, and tried to get her classmates to “join in her outrage,” a move that left her “isolated in anger,” and left the rest of the class “embarrassed and confused.”

Protopappas said she tried to check in with Wilks’ daughter the next day, but instead found herself suddenly labeled as “harmful to students.”

Wilks’ assistant head of school claimed that several students had complained of her presenting a “pro-France approach” and Islamophobic comments — claims she denies — and was warned by administrators that her class would be placed under strict scrutiny that fall, her suit states.

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Protopappas told The Post that she attempted to schedule meetings with administrators and with Wilks, but was denied.

The administrators, she said, never produced detailed allegations from students besides Wilks’ daughter, nor had any student advisors or evaluation reflected the supposed “harm” in her classroom.

“I’m very humble,” Protopapas said. “I’m ready to self-examine, but I can’t be blamed for things that, really, are beyond my control.”

Once school started, Protopappas had course proposals blocked by Wilks, who “justified her decision” by labeling her a “problematic teacher,” the suit reads.

After several classroom visits — “clearly a discriminatory act of retaliation,” the court filing claims — Protopapas was fired.

“I was told via email, by the way,” Protopapas said. “After 25 years, [and] you’ve given everything to a place.”

Her attorney, Sean Dweck, said they sent a letter asking for her to be reinstated last June, as a way to avoid the discrimination suit. The school declined.

But it’s not just her job she wants back — she wants the school to return to valuing teachers.

“​​The decision had been made,” Protopapas said, despite the lack of facts and evidence presented. “You just have to construct the narrative.”

“I signed up for the Spence School, not the Russian consulate,” she said.

In response to an email with a list of detailed questions, the Spence School said that they do not comment “on personnel matters or active litigation.”

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