Education

Texas School Board Doubles Down On Efforts To Censure Two Mothers Who Objected To District Policies

Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Kendall Tietz Education Reporter
Font Size:
  • Two conservative Texas school board members are embroiled in a legal battle against their fellow trustees fighting their attempts to investigate and censure them, they told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  • Mary Bone and Danielle Weston are up against the other five members of Round Rock Independent School District’s (RRISD) Board of Trustees, who are attempting to investigate and censure them for opposing their COVID policies and use of its police force to keep the public out of a Sept 14. board meeting, the two women told the DCNF. If the censure resolution passed, it would strip them of their powers and duties, restrict their access to school property and hinder their ability to do their job.
  • “They’re already combing through our emails, looking for when we said happy instead of glad, graveyard instead of cemetery … this is for two reasons: intimidation and retaliation for exposing what’s going on here,” Weston said.

Two conservative Texas school board members are embroiled in a legal battle against their fellow trustees fighting their attempts to investigate and censure them, they told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Mary Bone and Danielle Weston are up against the other five members of Round Rock Independent School District’s (RRISD) Board of Trustees, who are attempting to investigate and censure them for opposing their COVID policies and use of its police force to keep the public out of a Sept 14. board meeting, the two women told the DCNF. If the censure resolution passed, it would strip them of their powers and duties, restrict their access to school property and hinder their ability to do their job.

During Thursday night’s meeting, the school board initiated another attempt to censure Weston, separate from the original censure resolution involved in the lawsuit. The board passed both the first part of a three part censure process and a motion to launch an investigation into Weston’s emails.

In August, RRISD was still mandating masks for students, despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s Executive Order issued on July 29 that said no governmental entity, including school districts could require or mandate any person wear a face covering.

Protesters hold signs reading Mask on, brain off and I am not a conspirator, I am just a mother and Give Gates no chance during a protest of about 1000 people against lockdown measures and other government policies relating to the novel coronavirus crisis on May 16, 2020 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Gebert/Getty Images)

Protesters hold signs reading Mask on, brain off and I am not a conspirator, I am just a mother and Give Gates no chance during a protest of about 1000 people against lockdown measures and other government policies relating to the novel coronavirus crisis on May 16, 2020 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Gebert/Getty Images)

Weston said she raised her concerns with the school board in August for not complying with the law.

Weston forwarded school board emails to government officials and community members in an attempt to get the district to comply, because she said they didn’t have the authority to require masks in RRISD schools.

Weston said since she and Bone have sued the other school board members for their attempt to censure them, they are now turning to other “mechanisms” to go after them. “Back in August no one cared about these emails, but now it’s ‘investigation worthy,'” she explained. (RELATED: Heated Confrontation At A School Board Meeting Ends Early When A Board Member Gets Punched In The Face)

The board claims Weston forwarded emails that were protected by attorney-client privilege while communicating with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell and county attorney Dee Hobbs, along with community members, she told the DCNF. While emailing with community members, she blind carbon copied (BCC) people whenever she shared personal emails to make sure she in compliance with Texas law.

“If I just BCC people … it just simplifies things,” she told the DCNF. “So, they [RRISD Board of Trustees] didn’t like me doing that. They’re just they’re just complaining.”

Weston said the board was not able to articulate she had done anything wrong during the meeting Thursday.

“There are a total of three emails in question and some board members are asserting that two of them enjoy attorney-client privilege and that I should not have shared them with anybody without the approval of the entire board,” she said. “With regard to one of those emails, it is just a very threatening letter to me listing no specific dates, times, emails, actions etc that I supposedly did wrong.”

“It was vague and really only told me that I should not talk to members of the public,” she said. “This is not legal advice and me sharing it with others does not waive anyone on the boards attorney client privilege. In fact, Trustee Bone and I were the only ones who even received that email.”

At the end of the meeting, the board voted to investigate the trustees’ emails. Even though the board won’t explicitly clarify whose emails they are investigating, Weston told the DCNF they are specifically targeting her emails.

“They’re already combing through our emails, looking for when we said happy instead of glad, graveyard instead of cemetery … this is for two reasons: intimidation and retaliation for exposing what’s going on here,” Weston said.

Since they were elected to the board in November of 2020, they have seen that laws, policies and procedures often aren’t followed, Bone told the DCNF. They noticed that the lawyers who worked for the district “would just basically tell the board anything they wanted to hear.”

At a Sept. 14 school board meeting, public seating was limited to 18 chairs and the police were stationed outside the meeting room to keep the public out. For a district of over 50,000 students, Bone and Weston said they were shocked to see such a sparse number of chairs in a room that usually had at least 70 to 100 chairs.

“I go outside and the police are literally … not allowing people to come in,” she said. “At that point, there’s two children actually crying out in the hallway, two students … they’re crying and everybody’s kind of upset.”

One district lawyer told them the seating limit was “district policy,” when they asked why the room was set up with so few seats, the two mothers told the DCNF. When they asked to see the policy, the superintendent explained it actually wasn’t a policy.

Bone and Weston decided to leave the meeting because they believed the board was in violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act.

Four days later on Sept. 18, they said censure resolutions had been added to an agenda that was already posted, but they expected just a “slap on the wrist.”

“Fast forward to Monday, we actually get this into resolutions and they’re vicious,” Bone said. “They’re accusing us of breaking a law.”

They sued the other five board members who initiated the resolutions as part of the first step in the process and were granted a temporary restraining order by the judge hours before the Sept. 22 meeting, where the school board planned to vote on the censure resolutions.

“We’re spending all this time in our board meetings on this where they’re now going to use taxpayer dollars instead of educating kids, to investigate me because I’m basically the crime of being too transparent,” Weston said. “The board is paralyzed by politics and they are obsessed with silencing people who question them … whether it’s the school board members or parents.”

“I think school boards are used to running this way,” Bone said. “I don’t think this is something new. I think it’s just been exposed through people engaging in their school boards and asking for transparency and accountability.”

As moms of children in RRISD, Bone and West decided to run for school board because they have seen first-hand what kids have gone through during the pandemic. (RELATED: Wisconsin Mom Says 5-Year-Old Child Accessed Porn Website, ‘Inappropriate Content’ With School iPad)

“Last year, with virtual learning and isolation and quarantine … we understand the suffering that these children have endured,” Weston said. “Whether it’s historic academic learning loss, whether it’s struggling with their mental health, we know the damage that has been inflicted on our children.” 

Bone and Weston told the DCNF that they have spent almost $50,000 on legal fees with their personal and community-raised money, but their goal is simply to serve children and focus on education.

When the school board spends time writing censure resolutions, they are hiring lawyers with taxpayer money that will never reach the classroom, they said. The district has a yearly budget of over $460 million, which creates an environment of “cronyism,” as the district uses its budget to build and buy things that aren’t immediate necessities, Bone said.

“We’re not there to give an adult a workplace and we’re not there to give you know contractors things to build,” Bone said. “At the end of the day, they would sell the children out” to build a new building. 

Bone and Weston have a hearing for their lawsuit and temporary restraining order on Dec. 22, where the judge will decide if the case can move forward to the discovery phase.

As we go into 2022, our community can look forward to these five school board members continuing to spend time, energy and money in trying to silence Mary and I,” Weston said. 

RRISD did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel