Thursday 12 May 2022 09:29 PM Two Texas fathers sue Round Rock Independent School District board for free ... trends now

Two Texas fathers who were arrested for allegedly disrupting Round Rock Independent School District board meetings are now suing, claiming their right to free speech was violated.

Jeremy Story and Dustin Clark were escorted out of school board meetings after speaking out against Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez in two separate incidents at the end of 2021.

Azaiez had previously been accused of trying to get his mistress to abort their baby and then assaulting her when she refused but was never criminally charged. 

Story and Clark were booted from the building when they brought up allegations of misconduct against Azaiez during the meetings in August and September.

Days after the second incident in September, both Story and Clark were arrested by the sheriff's office on disorderly conduct charges. 

Now, in a lawsuit filed months later that was obtained by Fox News Digital, the fathers claim the district violated their rights to petition the government for redress and violated their rights to exercise free speech without retaliation. 

'The overall trend is basically a conspiracy among many of them to remove and restrain the civil rights of citizens whom they disagree with,' Jeremy Story, told Fox News Digital on Thursday. 

'They ultimately have gone to great lengths to silence parents who disagree with them and ultimately to conceal their own malfeasance.'

Story told Fox News Digital he hoped the lawsuit will become 'a landmark case to reverse the loss of parental rights across the country and to give parents a voice back in their kids' education.'

'We want our public education system to simply educate our children and when we send our children to the public school, we are not submitting to be co-parents with the federal government,' he added.

The lawsuit comes months after the September 17 arrests of Story and Clark, which calls the disorderly charges 'false' and 'trumped-up,' claiming they 'did not constitute a basis for arrest because they were simply exercising their constitutional right to participate in the board meeting.'

In August 2021, Story - a father of seven - attempted to voice his concerns about the allegations against Azaiez, prompting then-Board President Amy Weir to cut him off, warning him not to speak about a topic unrelated to the meeting's agenda. Police then escorted Story out of the meeting.

Weir previously told Fox News that 'there has never been an attempt to silence Mr. Story.' 

She added that Story wrote on a card indicating what he would say at the meeting, and he wrote that 'unlike the board, citizens are not required to speak on items on the agenda,' thus indicating that 'he was planning to speak on a topic not listed for the meeting,' Weir said. 

In September 2021, Clark, a father of four, also mentioned the allegations of misconduct against Azaiez, during a school board meeting that was set up with just 18 chairs in a room that could 300 people and prevented members of the public from entering. 

'These actions seemed to be an effort to intimidate parents and control the optics by arbitrarily restricting the capacity of parents and community members allowed in the boardroom,' Clark previously told Fox News Digital.

The school board passed a tax increase at that meeting, an increase that the lawsuit claimed was illegal.

Clark was removed from the building and school district officials blamed COVID restrictions on the reduced capacity.

A few days after the September incident, both Story and Clark were arrested by the sheriff's office on charges of hinder proceeding by disorderly conduct.

Story called on the school board to investigate its own members, but the board voted against the

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