Texas dads arrested after getting vocal at school board meetings sue school district for violating free speech
Categories: US Education News
Two Texas fathers who were arrested for allegedly disturbing meetings of the Round Rock Independent School District school board have filed a federal lawsuit claiming the district and its agents violated their rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution."The overall trend is basically a conspiracy among many of them to remove and restrain the civil rights of citizens whom they disagree with," one of the arrested fathers, Jeremy Story, told. "They ultimately have gone to great lengths to silence parents who disagree with them and ultimately to conceal their own malfeasance."In the lawsuit, Story and Dustin Clark claimed the school district, five members of the board of trustees, Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez and members of the school district police force violated their rights under the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment and 42 U.S. Code 1983. They claimed the school board acted illegally in hiring Azaiez, in passing a tax increase and in arranging for their arrests. The scandal and the arrests The lawsuit centered on the arrests of Story and Clark on Sept. 17, 2021, on one misdemeanor charge each of hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct. The lawsuit called the charges "false" and "trumped-up," claiming they "did not constitute a basis for arrest because Plaintiffs were simply exercising their constitutional right to participate in the board meeting." The charge against Story traced back to a board meeting on Aug. 16, 2021, in which Story attempted to voice concerns about Azaiez, whom the district recently had hired. The district temporarily suspended Azaiez in January 2022, after the Texas Education Agency recommended suspension due to accusations the superintendent faced from his former girlfriend. (The district reinstated him in March.) The charges against Clark traced to a Sept. 14, 2021, school board meeting in which RRISD set up 18 chairs in a room that accommodated 300 people and prevented members of the public from entering. "These actions seemed to be an effort to intimidate parents and control the optics by arbitrarily restricting the capacity of parents and community members allowed in the boardroom," Clark previously told Fox News Digital.The school board passed a tax increase at that meeting, an increase that the