Stop resisting
There’s that teacher in Louisiana who was arrested and handcuffed for asking questions at a school board meeting about why an administrator was getting a raise while teachers hadn’t had a raise in years.
Deyshia Hargrave had a question for the Vermillion Parish School Board: Why was the superintendent getting a pay raise when teachers like her and other school employees hadn’t had one in years?
“I feel like it is a slap in the face of all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have,” she told the board in a public meeting Monday. “We work very hard with very little.”
What happened next might have stayed in the tiny Louisiana town of Abbeville, about 150 miles west of New Orleans. But captured on videotape and viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube, it became an international incident. The school board reportedly received death threats from around the world, as local parents and teachers planned their own protests.
Nix the death threats, dammit. Can people not object to something without making death threats?!
As the superintendent, Jerome Puyau, began to respond to Hargrave, a city marshal approached the middle-school English teacher.
“You are going to leave or I am going to remove you,” the marshal said. “Take your things and go.”
“Excuse me,” she said to him.
“Is it against policy to stand?” she asked the board as the marshal attempted to grab her arm.
Hargrave then grabbed her purse and began to exit the meeting room as members of the audience protested. “This is the most disgraceful and distasteful thing I have ever seen,” one woman said as Hargrave made her way out.
Seconds later, the crowd expressed alarm when a man announced Hargrave was being handcuffed.
The camera then showed Hargrave lying on the floor of the hallway.
“What are you doing?” Hargrave screamed as the marshal handcuffed her hands behind her back. “Are you kidding me?”
“Stop resisting,” the marshal said, hustling Hargrave toward an exit after lifting her to her feet.
“I am not. You just pushed me to the floor,” Hargave responded. “Sir … I am way smaller than you.”
She’s not being prosecuted, but the school board president, Anthony Fontana, nevertheless says it was her fault.
In a Wednesday interview with the local KPEL-FM radio station, Fontana said that Hargrave was at fault.
The board’s agenda Monday night, Fontana said, was simply to vote up or down on the superintendent’s contract, not to ask questions or discuss the issues of the contract.
“Let me tell you this: She’s a schoolteacher,” he said. “If a child gets up in her classroom and starts talking in the middle of the class and she tells the child to sit down and the child doesn’t sit down, what does she do? She removes the child from the classroom and sends them to the principal’s office. We have rules.”
Uhhh not the same thing. Different in so many ways. Adult citizens are not children.
Teachers do have a legitimate interest in why they’re not getting raises when the people who Administer them are.
Maybe I missed something, but it appeared the board members were annoyed but still talking to her when the cop stepped in of his own accord and dramatically escalated the situation.
This has been reported as far away as NZ (which is about as far away as it can be reported). Utterly utterly shameful behaviour on the part of the Marshall and of the Board administration. From comments made by others there appears to be a long running back story around treatment of women by the Board – referred to by the Boards two women members as well as others. Something here is deeply rotten.
I am writing this from faraway New South Wales, Australia.
I take it from the above that the School Board has the power to set the salaries of both administrators and teachers.
Well, in both cases, what you pay for is what you get. But I will suggest in passing that the teachers could probably step into the shoes of any Board member, as such positions are normally filled by people with a variety of backgrounds: managers, dog catchers, company directors, plumbers, pharmacists, car mechanics, shopkeepers, bootmakers, professional gamblers, greenkeepers on the local golf course, … etc.
But every teacher is a specialist, whether working at primary, high school or college level. In the life of each student between ages 5 and 18 years, they have to bring him or her up to speed in the function and literature of their native language; a foreign language; one or all of the natural sciences; survival mathematics to the tertiary-entry variety; current state of the art information technology as well as the more traditional varieties; the history of their society if not the world; the geography of the planet and beyond, etc, etc, etc.
Most Board members would fall at the first hurdle.
How dare they rank mere paper shuffling and administrivia above all that?
School boards were among the first targets for the Xtian Right. For more than thirty years, poorly reported school board elections, especially in off-years, were used to plant creationists and homophobes into local governments, and especially into the Republican party apparatus.
Banana republics like Louisiana were among the first to see this kind of bottom-up takeover.
I don’t know how it is in NSW, or even in Louisiana, but I can tell you from my own experience as a voter in two different states that teachers who run for the School Board are not going to get elected. School Board elections are highly prone to that anti-expertise mindset that put the current occupant of the White House into his lavish “dump” (his words, not mine). The belief is that the School Board needs to be made of non-teaching parents and citizens who will do what the citizens want, and not the experts, because the parents are more qualified to know what their children should be taught than the experts in the field in which they are being taught. Where this belief came from I don’t know fully, but in my progression through the educational system, first as student, then as professor, I saw many, many manifestations of it. Part of it goes to the idea of democracy – the majority should always get what they want (a rather muddled, simplistic view of a democracy, but it’s the prevalent one here). The other pernicious idea is that people have the right to raise their children how they wish – a view that most people across the spectrum hold. It is only valid if you assume that the children are the property of the parents, and not people in their own right. In short, it is a holdover from the period when children actually were the property of the parents and the parents could do as they wished with them, including choose who they marry or, in the case of females, sell them to the highest bidder in the dowry sweepstakes. Parents have no rights to bring their children up as little “Mini-Mes”. They have a responsibility to bring the child up to have the skills and education to meet their desires within the limits of what they are capable of and is legal (in short, I think if a child’s one main goal is to be a serial killer, at that point a different responsibility kicks in – the responsibility to the society they live in).
Until we strike off all of the heads of this anti-intellectual, anti-expertise hydra, until we slay the beast, we will continue to see it rearing up and overwhelming the ability of society to function at full capacity, and with fairness and decent morality (not the morality of the evangelicals, but a true morality that recognizes and respects the humanity of different individuals and doesn’t reek of sexism, racism, or any of the other nasty isms). In short, I say once again, I think we may be screwed.
[OT
A “Transfeminine activist” has written a style guide on the language pertaining to trans people. It’s a fucking train wreck, blatantly (and I suspect deliberately) erasing biological sex as a relevant term.]
This video was all over the french media here.
Teachers do have a legitimate interest in why they’re not getting raises when the people who Administer them are.
That’s a question many working people ask themselves when it comes to management salaries\raises