Judge: Ejecting teacher from school board meeting broke law

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY
November 19, 2018

A Louisiana school board violated the state’s open meetings law by ejecting a teacher who spoke out against giving the superintendent a $30,000 raise, a state judge has ruled.

Judge David Smith also threw out the raise given Jan. 8 to Vermilion Parish Schools Superintendent Jerome Puyau (PEE-oh), who returned to work this month despite a 6-2 school board vote putting him on paid leave.

Neither Puyau nor teacher Deyshia Hargrave, who was told at that meeting that her comments had nothing to do with the agenda and was ordered to leave after she continued to speak, could immediately be reached for comment. School offices are closed for Thanksgiving and Puyau did not respond to an email; Hargrave did not immediately respond to a phone message.

Her removal from the Jan. 8 meeting and her rough, video-recorded arrest sparked outrage across the U.S.

“She was expressing her concerns to the Superintendent regarding a pay raise he would be accepting,” Vermilion Parish Judge David Smith wrote in a ruling signed Nov. 8 and mailed Thursday. “Her comments were most certainly germane to the agenda item ‘Audience Concerns for the Superintendent.’ Not only was she silenced, she was forcibly removed from the meeting by the security guard for the meeting, an off-duty police officer.”

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