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A teacher asked a great question about superintendent pay. And then she got arrested.

She was handcuffed and placed in the backseat of a cop car.

Screenshots via YouTube/Chris Rosa

Deyshia Hargrave speaking at a school board meeting, being arrested

We all know teachers have one of the hardest jobs in America: Educating our country's children while often working without enough resources, institutional support or even a livable salary. But a story from 2018, showcases one of the most egregious examples of unfair pay in the public school system. But we promise it has a happy ending.

Why should a superintendent get a raise while teachers in the same district struggling to make ends meet see their paychecks flatline — year after year after year?

Teacher Deyshia Hargrave begged the question. Minutes later, she was handcuffed and placed in the backseat of a cop car. The scene was captured below by YouTube user Chris Rosa, who attended a board meeting for Vermilion Parish Schools in Louisiana. You can watch Hargrave begin speaking about 33 seconds in. The situation starts becoming contentious around 6:35 minutes. Hargrave is arrested at 8:35, and then walked outside in handcuffs and placed in the back of police vehicle.


- YouTubewww.youtube.com


Hargrave was questioning the school board how they can vote to give the superintendent a raise when school employees have not gotten a raise.

"We work very hard with very little to maintain the salaries that we have," Hargrave, who teaches middle school language arts, said during a public comment portion of the meeting, stating that she's seen classroom sizes balloon during her time at the school with no increased compensation. "We're meeting those goals, while someone in that position of leadership [the superintendent] is getting raise? It's a sad, sad day to be a teacher in Vermilion Parish."

According to comments Hargrave made to BuzzFeed News, she believes Superintendent Jerome Puyau was already making $110,000 before the board voted to give him a raise of $38,000. The raise alone is roughly the salary of "a teacher, or two cafeteria workers, or two janitors," Hargrave told the outlet.

After Hargrave spoke out again later in the meeting, a city marshal on duty asked her to leave — even though the school board was still addressing her.

"You're going to leave, or I'm going to remove you," the officer told her, as seen in the video. Many people in attendance seemed shocked. "Are you serious?" someone asked, aghast, in the crowd.

Hargrave leaves the room, followed by the officer. But moments later, someone chimed in, "he's putting her in handcuffs" — and the room erupts in disarray.

"I am not [resisting], you just pushed me to the floor!" Hargrave is heard screaming at the officer, as he forcibly removes her down the hallway and out the building in handcuffs. "Sir, hold on! I am way smaller than you!"


- YouTubewww.youtube.com


According to KATV News, Hargrave was booked in the city jail for resisting an officer — a fact that left many commenters online flabbergasted. School officials are reportedly not pressing charges. "Umm ... what charges could they possibly make?" one Redditor noted.

With help from the Reddit community, Rosa's video has gone viral, garnering more than 600,000 views in less than 24 hours. Clearly, Hargrave's earnest question about inequality in our education system — met with a grotesque abuse of power — has clearly touched a nerve with people across the country.

"I don't know how this teacher could have been more polite and patient in her earnest desire to find out why the superintendent deserves a raise while the teachers work harder with less," YouTube commenter Scott Wells chimed in. "She continued to press because they refused to come up with an answer. Seems like a good question to me."

We agree.

Thankfully, Hargrave's efforts were not in vain. The incident ended up going viral, drawing national attention from several media outlets, including Upworthy, who pointed out the injustice in blocking educators like Hargrave from having a place to speak in opposition to the pay raises. Later in 2018, a Lafayette court invalidated the superintendent's contract, according to The Daily Advertiser. A state appeals court backed the decision.

The Advertiser reports that in 2019, Hargrave filed a lawsuit over her arrest. Later that year, the Vermilion Parish School Board voted to remove Payou from his role, according to KATC. Later that year, Payou agreed to resign from his position and a settlement was reached over the initial case surrounding his pay raise. He is now retired.


This article originally appeared six years ago. It has been updated with new information.

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She's started 3 organizations. And each one made a huge difference in people's lives.

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Facebook #SheMeansBusiness

"Self-starter" should be Adrianna Tan’s middle name.

In four years' time, 30-year-old powerhouse Adrianna Tan founded three different organizations — all of which empower people and improve lives across the world.

It seems like there's nothing the young entrepreneur hasn't done; she's traveled to 30 countries (and given a TEDx Talk on curing wanderlust); advocated for gender equality, LGBT rights, and using capitalism to empower people; and figured out a way to incorporate her penchant for travel, education, food, and collaboration into successful businesses that have made life better for hundreds of people.

Image via Adrianna Tan, used with permission.

Adrianna's always on the lookout for ways she can improve her surrounding communities via technology and social outreach.

"Being from a part of the world [Asia] with so many wonderful experiences but also so many dire ones definitely shaped the way I thought about life and business.I saw no point in building a company in Asia to solve only 'first world problems,'" Tan told Upworthy.

The first organization she started is the Gyanada Foundation, which aims to fully fund education for underprivileged girls from five cities in India.

The literacy rate in India, especially for women, historically has been low. By the time Adrianna, who was born in Singapore, had spent a decade living in and traveling to India, she had seen firsthand that the bar for education for women needed to be raised. She had already been volunteering for educational nonprofits that were working with girls in need, so she simply decided to start her own.

Image via Adrianna Tan/Gyanada Foundation, used with permission.

Thanks to her foundation, 150 Indian girls receive educational scholarships each year.The foundation has done so well that it won the Public Service Award from Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leaders Initiative, which included a $10,000 grant.

Next up, the foundation plans to expand: It's working on incorporating a sex-education-through-theater class and a coding class for their girls to get a leg up in the tech world.

Image via Gyanada Foundation/Facebook, used with permission.

In 2013, Adrianna moved on to a project that fueled her food-loving heart: Culture Kitchen.

Image via Culture Kitchen/YouTube.

Culture Kitchen provides pop-up, cross-cultural potlucks of sorts, where traditional dishes are served, and local Singaporeans and migrant workers can meet and interact.

The idea for it came out of the inordinate amount of xenophobia Adrianna was witnessing both in person and online.

"I decided I wanted to create moments for people across different ethnicities and cultures, and class, to meet and eat with each other," she explained.

Image via Adrianna Tan, used with permission.

Not surprisingly, the idea caught on, and in June of last year, Culture Kitchen was awarded $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in flights by Jetstar's Flying Start Program.

Then came Wobe, a program that aims to give Southeast Asian women the opportunity to provide for their families using only their phones.

Image via Wobe/Facebook, used with permission.

The idea for Wobe came out of an all too common problem: "How do we create income and employment to millions of women who need to provide for their families, but can't?"

To the tech-savvy Adrianna, the answer was simple: create an app. The app helps these women start their own micro-businesses, such as selling prepaid phone credit and other digital commodities that are in high demand in Southeast Asia. Right now, they are in pre-launch phase, but their projected impact looks promising — Adrianna says that if the program catches on, they expect Wobe will be able to increase the income of Indonesian women by 30% to 200%.

At the end of the day, it all comes back to collaboration.

Image via Adrianna Tan, used with permission.

Working with others across countries and cultural boundaries is behind everything Adrianna does. Her ability to collaborate with pretty much anyone anywhere is why she’s had so many successes in business — including being named a Top Female Entrepreneur of 2015 by True Global Ventures.

"I've had to learn several languages, more 'slang words' and inter-cultural ways of working with people from all backgrounds. Being able to communicate effectively helps a lot, but more than that it is the ability to 'read' situations and context. That is wonderful for business in more than one way," she said.

Social media makes creating these connections easier — Adrianna says that she's found most of her cofounders and collaborators through Facebook and other networks, and it's also how she stays in touch with the communities she's created.

"I've used social media for many years now, and I've found that it is especially effective for business in the emerging markets, where I work. ... It lets us talk directly to real people in real time, and for that Wobe is able to gain invaluable insights."

Adrianna knows you can’t always look ahead and calculate all the risks, especially when setting out as an entrepreneur — sometimes you just have to jump.

As she puts it, "Look into enhancing your risk appetite and more importantly calibrating it, and then take as much of it as you can," she said. "Nothing will move until risk is an element, and that was my most important lesson."

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The Chicago Teachers Union strike is a big deal. This is what you should know.

Chicago teachers want change. Now.

Chicago teachers have had enough.

"We are frustrated; we are angry," Anna Stevens, a third-grade teacher on the city's north side, told Upworthy. "And our students deserve better."

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Teachers in Chicago are striking for one day to send a strong message to city and state officials.

Stevens is one of the Windy City's roughly 27,000 public school teachers taking part in the April 1, 2016, strike — an "unprecedented" move by educators in the third-largest school district in America.


"We know that students need so much more than what we’re offering them," she said.

The Chicago Teachers Union's "day of action" is in direct response to abysmal state education funding and a local failure to manage what many would consider a school district in crisis.

Budget cuts have left schools grappling to make ends meet — particularly on the city's impoverished west and south sides — and teachers are fed up with seeing their students carry the brunt of the inequality.

The strike on April 1 included protests across the city, followed by a rally at City Hall, and a "shut it down" march in the bustling Chicago Loop area downtown intended to draw as much attention as possible to the education crisis.


Union representative Ed Dziedzic told DNA Info about a west-side school where students were forced to sit at desks with sharp edges that could have been from the 1930s. That school, like so many others in recent years, has since closed.

"What message are we sending to those kids?" he said. "That they are not worthy."

Art programs have been slashed, physical education curriculums have been tossed aside, and shrinking budgets have left educators like Gloria Fallon, a swimming instructor, teaching in unsafe conditions — there have been days where she's been in charge of 30 children in a pool all by herself, she explained to CBS News.

Teachers have been largely affected by budget cuts and labor disputes too.

They're currently working without a contract. After the previous one between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Rahm Emanuel — not quite a hometown hero amongst Chicago's teachers — expired last summer, a new agreement has yet to be reached, leaving educators working with little security as the 2016-2017 school year looms ahead.

There have been unfair changes to rules regarding teacher salary pay increases, and teachers have been forced to take multiple furlough days in order for the district to save money.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

The situation facing Chicago's students and teachers is tough. But it's part of a much larger problem when it comes to public education in America.

School districts across the country are "fundamentally separate and unequal," former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncansaid last March — a reality that disproportionately affects communities of color.


Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

The stats back up the former secretary's claim. Across the U.S., districts in more affluent areas are funded by state and local governments at substantially higher rates than in impoverished communities. This funding gap is the worst in Pennsylvania, where the wealthiest districts receive, on average, 33% more funding than the poorest.

Disparities in Chicago are not the exception.

We should all be rallying around Chicago's educators right now because this is a problem that goes far beyond the Windy City.

And the good news is, it sounds like Chicagoans have their teachers' backs.

Stevens, who rallied alongside dozens of other teachers and parents, told Upworthy that it's been wonderful hearing input from community members outside the system.

"It was lovely," she said of the passing honking cars and outspoken supporters who want what's best for students and teachers. "Almost everyone was very supportive."

Bravo, Chicago teachers, for standing up for kids who deserve better.

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An epic solution for saving our quickly disappearing school music programs.

3D printers and violins have more in common than you might think.

Imagine a high school bus stop around 7:30 a.m.

You’d see maybe eight teenagers: three holding sports duffle bags; one reading a library book; another holding a large art portfolio. The last three might be holding instrument cases shaped like guitars, violins, and trombones.

But what if those instruments disappeared? Unfortunately, that's the reality for many K-12 students across the country.

These days, most American K-12 schools are focusing heavily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, but performing arts programs are getting left behind. When extracurricular budgets are tight, music programs are often the first to go.

As it turns out, STEM programs could actually save music programs.

That's Kaitlyn Hova's great idea.

Kaitlyn Hova. All photos provided by the Hovas, used with permission.

At 13 years old, Kaitlyn became a professional violinist and toured all over the country. To book more gigs, she created a website and started playing around with code, too. But it wasn’t until a music theory course at Berklee College of Music in Boston that Kaitlyn discovered that she had synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that connects one sensory with another.

Synesthesia inspired Kaitlyn to change academic paths, switching from music in Boston to neuroscience classes at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, in her hometown. After graduating, she also attended Omaha Code School with her husband, Matt Hova, and created the synesthesia network called a “Facebook for people with Synesthesia” to gather data for her epidemiological studies.

Two years ago, Kaitlyn and Matt began printing shapes and stationery and eventually full instruments on a 3D printer.

They stumbled past an Instagram post of David Perry's F-F-Fiddle, a full-sized violin printed with a 3D printer, which inspired the tech-savvy couple to design and 3D-print a violin of their very own. Over the next year and a half, after creating over 60 failed models, the Hovas experimented their way to a 3D-printed, fairly cheap violin that they called the Hovalin 2.0.

The Hovas with their Hovalins.

The best part? Kaitlyn and Matt want to use their invention to help save music programs.

Their idea is that kids in STEM programs could 3D-print instruments in class, thereby saving music programs and lowering each school's costs (the instruments would be free!). Right now, they're working with school districts to raise enough money to put 3D printers in schools all over the U.S., hoping to kickstart the idea into action.

"After making the [Hovalin], we realized it could be really wonderful thing to try to help out with music programs," Kaitlyn explains. "Maybe they have a good STEM program going on, but their music program is losing funding."

"It's so empowering for kids to see they can make something out of software," Kaitlyn said. "I think it makes it more accessible."

The Hovas are not the first and probably won't be the last to create a 3D-printed violin. But they are the first to use their invention for good in this particular way.

The best part is that this solution is relatively simple but full of creativity and possibility. Plus, a recent study shows that kids benefit from music training as much as from basic classes, like mathematics.

As a former music student from a school with an at-risk music program, the Hovas' awesome intentions struck a chord with me. We need more simple, effective solutions like these for our kids. Here’s to hoping the program takes off!

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