At a Jersey City Board of Education Town Hall, Vice President Dejon Morris stated that they cannot drop the defiant trespass charges against Emily Pecot, a parent arrested for defiant trespass on May 21st for allegedly disrupting the board meeting by yelling out.
By Dan Israel/Hudson County View
Yesterday’s meeting followed a special board meeting last week in the wake of Pecot’s arrest, where rising tensions remained on full display from parents.
When asked by parent Anjali Prakash if and when the board was going to drop the charges against Pecot, Board Vice President Dejon Morris maintained that the charges were brought by the Jersey City Police Department and not the BOE.
“The board of education did not press charges,” Morris said, even though he is listed as the complainant in the police report of the incident, as HCV first reported.
While Prakash noted that fact, Morris gave his point of view about what happened that evening – claiming he never spoke to law enforcement.
“When the police were called, she defiantly did not listen to their order, so they placed an arrest. They put my name as a complainant. I never spoke to the police,” he asserted.
“I never had a conversation with them, but I am a complaint on there because, through the microphone, I suggested what they should do. So now this is not in the board of education’s hands. It now belongs in the court’s hands. We didn’t press charges against them, so we cannot drop them.”
During his response, parent Tere Fox began to verbally disagree from the audience, which prompted Morris to ask her to address him from the podium and not shout from her seat.
“You did not stop that arrest from happening. So maybe you didn’t make it happen, but you didn’t stop it from happening. And the mother of a special ed child just trying to advocate for her child was arrested. You didn’t stop that,” she declared.
“So you sit here today saying that you are here to support parents, that you’re here to listen, but you’re still holding that same … It was abuse of power what you did. We have it on video, you saying that you can have her arrested. You’ve done that to other people before. And if you-”
At that point, Morris interjected to have Board Counsel Ramon Rivera respond to Fox, which she said was “because you can’t answer for yourself.”
Morris said he can answer it albeit he wanted Rivera to speak first, but before Morris could finish his full sentence Fox told him to “be a man and answer it for” himself.
“We’re going to let the attorney answer first, and then if I feel like I need to back it up, I will,” Morris said.
Fox then walked away from the podium, to which Morris asked if she wanted an answer to her questions or not, to which she contended he was “not going to be honest.”
“You can’t answer it for yourself,” Fox said.
Eventually, in response, Rivera echoed much of what Morris said prior, including that the charges against Pecot are now in the hands of the Jersey City PD.
He added that once the interaction began between officers and Pecot, the board had no authority to ask the police to stop what they were doing since “they were already called to address the situation.”
” … There is a policy that permits the chair to request law enforcement to assist. Once law enforcement gets engaged, it’s now an issue between the Jersey City Police Department and that individual, and the board does not have jurisdiction to say, ‘Police officers, please halt whatever action you’re taking,'” Rivera said.
“Because at that point, we would be directing them- or the chair would- and there’s no legal authority to direct police officers to stop an action once it begins between an individual.”
Fox inquired who called the police if Morris didn’t to which he told her it was the BOE Director of Security Rhuddell Snelling.
However, Fox pushed back that he called the police under Morris’ influence, to which Morris doubled down that the meeting was being disrupted by Pecot and other parents of special needs children protesting in the back of the auditorium where that meeting was held.
“The director of security, as well as everyone else, was in the room when the preamble was read. Anyone can see that meeting was disruptive. We called on the assistance of the police,” expressed Morris.
“The president had to go to recess because it was so disruptive. To regain order, the request for police were called. They took over the incident. She was asked, they did what they had to do, and that’s the end of it.”
Fox quipped back that this could have been prevented if the board had listened to parents like Pecot when they first started speaking up years ago.
“If perhaps you guys didn’t fail that parent from the beginning and for years of trying to get help for her child, then maybe that would not have happened,” Fox said.
“You guys continue to fail the parents of Jersey City and you keep putting mandates that don’t stick on problems that you could all come together to take care of. You have a huge budget, you have lots of people who care on all sides. So I really just hope that you guys get it together.”
Prakash returned to the podium and asked the board why Pecot was the one was arrested out of two or three dozen parents who were upset at the meeting.
“I was there in that meeting and I was actually sitting right next to her. Before the board went into recess, there were probably two or even three dozen parents getting a little upset about what was being said about Ed Tech, where there was too much screen time and they were told to take the issue back to individual principals,” she recalled.
“And we were like, ‘Well, if that is happening in multiple schools, let’s solve it from the top instead of going to the schools.’”
According to Prakash, there was a lot of shouting from the back going on, but no one moved forward past the last chair in the auditorium.
Morris replied that as a prior board president, he is familiar with the tools that role has to keep control of a meeting, and he said that’s what Velazquez did when she called a recess until security was able to regain control over the meeting.
“All I know is, at some point, our director felt as if he could not control the meeting and he called assistance, which was the police, and they came,” he stated.
Morris told Prakash that he can’t answer to everything that happened during the recess, but reiterated that the board strictly follows its preamble at every meeting.
Prakash pushed back on Morris that by time the board came back from recess, everybody had already quieted down and proceeded, leading her to wonder, again, why Pecot specifically was targeted.
She repeated that it was unclear what she did in that moment to provoke the arrest in comparison to the dozens of other parents.
Morris said this was “not a courtroom,” and that he couldn’t give answers from a legal perspective, but he said she could speak with the arresting officer at JCPD to get answers and he repeated that the preamble is strictly enforced.
Former Board President Suzanne Mack, the board’s longest serving trustee, recalled how hard meetings can be to control, highlighting how one particularly shocking incident.
“’I think you should put a gun in your mouth and shoot yourself because then you will die with dignity,’” she noted one attendee said, but Mack didn’t view it as a threat, but an expression of frustration and just asked how their family and dog was doing in response.
Morris then appeared to be frustrated that the narrative again appeared to be shaping up that Pecot was simply arrested for advocating for her special needs daughter.
“So let’s just make sure that’s clear. The reason why this is national is because there are narratives in the community and being made up by certain groups so that they could get more attention, I guess, for their cause,” he declared.
“Bringing it to the point where we have an advocate that was arrested for advocating for special education, when in all of that actuality, that parent had her three minutes to speak and is becoming agitated and maybe a little overexcited.”
According to Morris, he said it is not the board’s prerogative to want to place a parent under arrest: “That is not the direction we want to go in,” he added, but again said the preamble must be followed and there are only so many tools at their disposal if its violated.
Noah Navarro, chief of staff to Jersey City Councilwoman at-Large Mamta Singh, asked the board to pass a non-binding resolution encouraging the municipal prosecutor to be as lenient as possible or to drop all charges against Pecot.
Morris then said he would discuss it with the board first to see if they want to go that way, but again repeated the importance of enforcing the district’s preamble.
Since this was a community outreach committee meeting, Trustee Natalia Ioffe was the chair and Board President Noemi Velazquez was only present in the audience.
