Members of the Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD) school board in Texas are attempting to strip their conservative colleagues of their duties after they complained about the board barring the public from attending meetings, according to Fox News.
RRISD has been under fire recently after the board used “its own armed agents to arrest parents who speak out against the school board’s policies,” as Breitbart News reported. The parents were forcibly removed from the school board meeting and subsequently arrested in their own homes by the school district’s police force.
Mary Bone and Danielle Weston, the two conservative board members, complained in September that the board had violated the Texas Open Meetings Act after it refused to allow many members of the public to attend a contentious meeting — the one at which the parents were arrested. Two days later, board president Amy Weir added two censure resolutions against Bone and Weston to the agenda.
Weston told Fox News that “the vicious censure resolutions to strip Trustee Mary Bone and me of the powers and duties bestowed upon us by the voters is a naked political hit job,” continuing that “the majority on the board are diverting taxpayer dollars and manpower away from students and teachers to destroy our reputations and inflict financial pain.”
The resolutions state that both board members “will be referred to as ‘Censured Trustee’… on all District communication, and on the Round Rock ISD website.” In addition, they will be banned from “visiting all Round Rock ISD properties in [their] official [capacities] as a Trustee without Board approval with the exception of Board Meetings.”
Weston and Bone filed a lawsuit that sought to keep the other five members from voting on their censures at the September 22 board meeting. A judge granted a temporary restraining order, but RRISD board members are challenging the court’s jurisdiction in a case to be heard December 22.
In their argument that the RRISD majority violated the Texas Open Meetings Act, Weston and Bone cited the fact that the board heavily restricted public access to the meeting by setting up only 18 chairs and stationing police officers at the entry points to stop members of the public from entering the room. RRISD has over 50,000 students and some of the largest high schools in Texas.
The Texas law states that the public is required to have full access to board meetings, and Weston told Fox news she left the meeting because the police were not allowing the public to enter.
After leaving, the RRISD majority voted to increase taxes. During the public comment period, as Breitbart News reported, two fathers, Jeremy Story and Dustin Clark, had spoken out against the school board’s “alleged corruption and school officials’ hostility toward parents.” Story, a minister, was cut off midsentence as superintendent Hafedh Azaiez ordered armed officers to remove him from the premises.
RRISD has its own police force answerable to the superintendent “with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit.” And only a few days after Clark’s removal from school board premises, the school district “sent police officers to the homes of both men [Story and Clark], arrested them, and put them in jail on charges of ‘disorderly conduct with intent to disrupt a meeting.’” They were released the next morning.
Bone told Fox News she believes the censure attempts are part of a “‘coordinated attack’ to silence critics of the school board and administration,” remarking that “When they arrested Jeremy and Dustin, that was Friday. They put our censures on the agenda on Saturday. This was a coordinated attack on us and what they call our supporters.”
“I totally believe that it was a coordinated attack, to reverse the election, and to silence anybody that has a voice that’s similar to ours,” she concluded. Weston called it “political persecution.”
Weston continued to Fox News, “This is our reward for speaking out when the majority marginalizes parents and stations the police at the entry of our board meetings, prohibiting access.”
“Since a restraining order is now in place to protect us, the majority have pivoted to other mechanisms to attack us,” she said. “They are combing through our emails and planning taxpayer-funded investigations with no end in sight. Kids deserve better. We aren’t going anywhere.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.
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