A small protest was held outside the Williamson County Jail Friday night after two people were arrested in connection to a Round Rock ISD board meeting earlier in the week.
The protesters said the arrests were unjust.
On Tuesday, Sept. 14, Round Rock ISD board members were set to discuss extending the district’s mask rules. But attendance inside the meeting was capped. Board members said they were trying to maintain social distancing. But members of the public say they were unfairly kept out of a public meeting.
One of the people who was escorted out was Dustin Clark. In video from Tuesday night, an argument can be heard between him and board members before a police officer made him leave the chamber.
“Mr. Clark, you have to leave. You have to leave. You have to leave, Mr. Clark. We cannot continue this,” the school board member said.
“You’re right, you can’t continue to keep the public out of here,” Clark can be heard saying.
“You have been warned, sir. You have a choice. You’ve been warned to be quiet or leave,” the board member responds.
“You’re not letting the public into an open meeting. Shame on you! Communists! Communists! Let the public in!” the man said.
Eventually, the board ended the meeting early and pushed the mask discussion to next week.
Clark is one of the people who was arrested Friday night. The other person arrested was Jeremy Story.
So the meeting was Tuesday but Clark and Story were arrested on Friday? For a misdemeanor? How often do sheriff’s deputies go to someone’s home to arrest people for a misdemeanor three days after the fact?
Story’s statement:
UPDATE: #JeremyStory and Dustin Clark have been released after @RoundRockISD sent the Williamson County Sheriff to arrest them for alleged "disorderly conduct."
Story has said RRISD stopped citizens from attending the school board meeting Tuesday. #LocalControl https://t.co/0d2X5FsqHB pic.twitter.com/I8gghG3hPm
— Robby Montoya (@RobbyMontoya) September 18, 2021
Like school districts across Texas and the country, the Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD) has grappled with the legal issues surrounding mask mandates for months. However, at RRISD, the local mask imbroglio has exposed divisions among the school board and dredged up allegations against the superintendent.
After flirting with a parental opt-out system, RRISD adopted a mask mandate that allows exceptions for children with medical reasons. This mandate expires tomorrow, prompting the board to put the possibility of a lasting mandate on the agenda for the September 14 meeting.
The proposed mandate would be a mask “matrix.” Under the proposed matrix, RRISD would adjust mask requirements based on Austin Public Health recommendations, which gauge the threat of COVID-19 in five possible stages. For example, a Stage 4 or 5 — the yellow and red options, respectively — would mean required masking at RRISD under the matrix. The Austin area has been in Stage 5, the highest stage, since early August.
However, amid a ruckus in the hallway and disagreements between members, the school board decided to table this item until September 18.
A number of attendees thronged outside the door of the meeting room, held at bay by RRISD police officers. The board was streaming a video feed of the meeting in an overflow room down the hall, but several attendees wanted to be in the meeting room with the trustees.
The board voted 5-2 to keep the limited seating arrangement. The two nay votes came from Trustees Mary Bone and Danielle Weston, outspoken critics of the district’s past mask policies. Bone and Weston left the meeting afterward, with Bone expressing frustration over the seating rule.
“They’re not upholding law. They’re upholding policy,” Bone said of the board’s decision to bar the attendees in the hall from entrance to the meeting.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently ended a suspension of the Open Meetings Act made necessary by COVID-19. Certain provisions of the law were paused during the pandemic to allow government bodies to keep crowds out of meeting rooms. This pause ended September 1.
Snip.
Backstage drama surrounding RRISD Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez thickens the plot.
Similar to other votes, Weston and Bone were the only two trustees to vote against hiring Azaiez, who raised eyebrows after becoming the district’s lone finalist in a hiring process that the two trustees and some parents called opaque.
Weston and Bone also issued a press release notifying the public that a woman claiming to be Azaiez’s mistress told the school board that he had assaulted her.
Jeremy Story, a Round Rock father active in Republican circles who has confronted the school board at public meetings before about these allegations, said he brought the issue to the attention of the Round Rock Police Department yesterday and the Williamson County Sheriff today.
Story was also one of the attendees at last night’s meeting. He was blocked and held by a police officer while trying to enter the meeting room and claims the board has targeted him for probing allegations against Azaiez.
“I did not aggress against them. They wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Nothing. My offense was walking through the door to get into the open meeting, public meeting, of a school board,” Story said.
The fact that Azaiez came from Donna ISD rang a bell with me, as that Rio Grande Valley district had a huge corruption scandal several years back, though Azaiez’s tenure as Superintendent there postdates the scandal.
This is the same Round Rock ISD that just had a Texas Education Agency Monitor installed as part of a corrective action plan stemming from a complaint lodged against the board during the 2018-19 school year.
TEA monitors report on the activities of the board of trustees or the superintendent. According to documents made public by the district Sept. 15, a complaint against the district from October 2019 found that previous board president Chad Chadwell did not recuse himself from discussion about a grievance against himself, alleging a conflict of interest and board overreach.
This action, the letter states, violates Texas Education Code Chapter 11, Subchapter D-Powers and Duties of Board of Trustees of Independent School District. The letter states that the TEA requested documentation related to the complaint in August of 2020, which was then reviewed by TEA Special Investigations Unit Investigator Rebecca Clevlen.
In other RRISD news, a Williamson County judge blocked their mask mandate because it violated Governor Abbott’s directive, only to have that block lifted by an appeals court the same day.
Parents around the country are waking up and demanding answers on a host of issues, including mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory, and school boards don’t seem to like it one bit. There are agendas at work that have nothing to do with teaching and everything to do with indoctrination.
Developing…
(Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)