This note was on the front door of central office. The door was locked.
Vermilion Parish School Board central office goes on lockdown because of threats
The central office of the School Board was on lock down for most of the day on Tuesday. The reason is because Superintendent Jerome Puyau was receiving serious threats on line, in his e-mail and from phone calls.
Starting early Tuesday morning, the phones at central office began ringing from people calling from all over the United States. They all wanted to speak to Puyau about the video they watched on the Vermiliontoday.com website, showing a Vermilion Parish teacher getting arrested by a security guard and being escorted out of the building in handcuffs.
Puyau’s secretary and the central office secretary spent the day taking messages.
Many of the phone calls almost had the secretaries in tears because of how mean the people were on the phone.
The threats got so bad, that all of the doors had to be locked and a sign on the doors instructed visitors to knock on the door to be let in.
An example of one phone call was from a New York person, asking to speak to the superintendent, who “told the security guard to go arrest the teacher in the audience.”
Another phone call was someone from Philadelphia asking to speak to the superintendant for “accepting a pay raise despite not giving the teachers a pay raise.”
Puyau said, on Tuesday, he never instructed the security guard to escort Deyshia Hargrave out of the meeting. In fact, the video shows Puyau trying to explain about how his new salary to Hargrave before the security guard approached Hargrave. Once the security guard began talking to Hargrave, Puyau did not say another word.
Another caller said Puyau should be tarred and feathered. The central office building is expected to remain on lock down until things calm down.
