Death Threats Come After Teacher Handcuffed In Louisiana

ABBEVILLE, LA — A school in Louisiana was placed on a brief lockdown Tuesday after receiving death threats from around the world following a widely publicized video that showed a teacher being handcuffed and escorted out of the building by a school resource officer. The teacher, Deyshia Hargrave, was ruled out of order by the school board president after she questioned the school superintendent's salary hike during a public school board meeting Monday.

Civil libertarians say the removal of the Vermilion Parish teacher raises constitutional concerns, but school board president Anthony Fontana said the police officer who handcuffed Hargrave acted appropriately and as any teacher would when dealing with an unruly student who disrupted a classroom.

“If a teacher has the authority to send a student, who is acting up in a classroom and she can’t control, out of the classroom to the principal’s office, under our policy we have the same rules,” Fontana said. “We have certain rules — three-minute speech, etcetera, it’s gotta be civilized, it can’t be off target, it’s gotta be related to the issue before the before the board, and that’s not what was happening.”

Fontana said the remarks that led to the teacher’s expulsion from the school board meeting were a “petty, personal attack on the superintendent and his family.”

Hargrave, a middle school English language arts teacher, spoke multiple times during the meeting to approve a new contract for Superintendent Jerome Puyau. The contract reportedly raises the superintendent’s salary, currently about $110,000 annually, by about $38,000, CBS News reported.

The raise was Puyau’s first since joining the Vermilion Parish School District in 2013 and brings his salary in line with what other area superintendents earn, Fontana has said. Teachers in the district haven’t received a raise in about a decade, and currently earn an average of $47,000 a year. The statewide average is $49,000 annually.

"A superintendent or any person or getting any type of raise I feel like is a slap in the face to all the teachers," Hargrave said.

A former "teacher of the year" for the district, Hargrave said many of her peers are afraid to speak up because they fear reprisal under Louisiana’s Act One education law, which gives school superintendents sweeping authority over personnel decisions.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana said it will continue to investigate the incident and “defend the constitutional rights of all Louisianans,” the Daily Advertiser reported.

“Deyshia Hargrave’s expulsion from a public meeting and subsequent arrest are unacceptable and raise serious constitutional concerns," the ACLU said in a statement. "The Constitution prohibits the government from punishing or retaliating against people for expressing their views, and the fact that a schoolteacher was arrested at a public meeting of the school board is especially troubling.”

The Louisiana Association of Educators, which is representing Hargrave, also condemned the teacher’s expulsion and said in a statement that “it is every citizen’ right to speak up for their beliefs” and that “any action that infringes upon this right is unlawful and unacceptable,” KATC-TV reported.

Hargrave was booked at the Abbeville city jail on charges of “remaining after being forbidden” and resisting an officer, but won’t be prosecuted, Ike Funderbunk, the city attorney and prosecutor, said. Hargrave posted bond, but it’s unclear when the charges will be formally dismissed.

The deputy marshal who arrested and handcuffed Hargrave is an employee of the school district, not the Abbeville Police Department, which distanced itself from the controversy in a statement:

“In response to the numerous requests for the teacher's booking information, the Abbeville Police Department is cooperating as directed by law. The Abbeville Police Department did not arrest the teacher Due to the location of her arrest and the arresting agency's jurisdiction, which includes the city limits of Abbeville, she was booked in and bonded from the local police department. The Abbeville Police Department has received numerous emails and phone calls about the arrest but all questions concerning this incident should be made to the Vermilion Parish School Board.”

Fontana told KATV that he ordered district employees not to answer phones after a spate of death threats, which he said came from multiple U.S. states, South America, Australia and England. They were reported to local law enforcement and the FBI, Fontana told the Daily Advertiser.

"I told my staff not to answer the phone unless they knew who it was,” Fontana said. “My staff was scared to death, because they got a call that a man said he was on his way to the school board office, making threats.”

Hargrave’s expulsion raised a broader issue — the treatment of women by the Vermillion Parish School Board. Board member Laura LeBeouf said at Monday’s meeting that it was consistent with “the way females are treated in Vermilion Parish.”

“I have never seen a man removed from this room,” LeBeouf said.

Later, LeBeouf told The Associated Press there have been several occasions when women were removed from school board meetings, but men who speak out have never been ejected.

"When she realized she had to get out, she picked up her purse and walked out," LeBeouf said. "Women in this parish are not getting the same treatment."

Another board member, Sara Duplechain, told The AP in an email there is “no reason for anyone to be treated this way” and said that in the three years she has been a school board member, “only women have been removed from board room meetings.”

Duplechain, in fact, filed a police report against Fontana last fall, saying that he yelled at her in the parking lot after a school board meeting, KATV reported. No charges were filed.

Patch has reached out to to Puyau, Fontana and the Vermillion Parish School District for comment. We’ll update this story if we hear back.

Image and video via The Associated Press, which contributed to this report.