A Louisiana teacher was handcuffed and forcibly removed during a meeting for asking a question

On Monday, January 8th, a Louisiana teacher was handcuffed after questioning the superintendent’s pay raise at a Vermillion Parish board meeting. Deyshia Hargrave disagreed with the board’s decision to give Superintendent Jerome Puyau a raise from $110,190 to $140,188, saying teachers and other employees had not received raises in several years.

"I feel like it's a slap in the face of all the teachers, cafeteria workers, and any other support staff," she told the board. "We work very hard with very little to maintain the salaries that we have."

Despite speaking calmly, she was stopped by an Abbeville city marshal officer, who told her, “You’re going to leave or I’m going to remove you.”

She complied, but in a video uploaded by KATC, the officer appears to push Hargrave to the ground and forcibly handcuff her outside of the room.

The footage shows the 32-year-old teacher struggling and screaming, “What are you doing?” He tells her to “stop resisting,” to which she replies, “I am not. You just pushed me to the floor.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1qien21GLE?feature=oembed

Board member Sara Duplechain, who also voted against the pay increase, said it isn’t the first time a woman has been told to leave a meeting.

"No reason for anyone to be treated this way. So far in 3 years, only women have been removed from board room meetings," she wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.

No charges will be filed against Hargrave, but she believes her right to free speech was violated — and so do we.