By Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise

A student protest at High Tech High School earlier this month should have been an opportunity our county’s flagship secondary school to teach our students a great lesson about how respect for demonstrations like this is a healthy part of our democracy.

Sadly we missed that chance, as the young people gathered silently with signs protesting the possible loss of a respected teacher were met with harsh language and threats of arrest by one of the district’s employees.

The situation was fraught with tension, and unfortunately one of our administrators, as a district spokesperson acknowledged, “used a poor choice of words” in communicating with students, who were following ACLU guidelines for such demonstrations.

The students were not disrupting instruction and the actions of this individual should not be an acceptable use of rhetoric, especially toward our bright scholars.

Safety concerns of course must drive the choices of our school staff, but in this case, I truly believe greater discretion was warranted. As a young man in the 1960s, I took part in the March on Washington to peacefully protest our continued involvement in the Vietnam War.

For decades after, as a Social Studies teacher, I taught and discussed with my students our right to peacefully protest in a free society as Americans citizens. Today, perhaps more than ever, we need young people engaged and willing to protest in the name of causes in which they believe.

So while I understand the anxiety about fire safety and perhaps being caught off guard by the students’ actions, I do believe we, as a county education system, appear to have missed a teachable moment. As someone who has prided himself for listening and seeking consensus as my way of doing business as an elected official for the last 25 years, the harsh response to this peaceful, quiet protest greatly disappointed me.

The matter of the employee in question is a personnel issue that must be handled by our independent school board and appointed school leadership. I will make no effort to interfere in their educational decision, but the response to the student protest is something I felt I had to weigh in on publicly.

The last thing we should be doing as adults and educators these days is discouraging peaceful protest by our young people who are letting their voices be heard; and frankly, we need more of it.

We live in upsetting times — times in which civility and respect for our fellow citizens seems to have become a thing of the past. We ought to respect peaceful protest by young people rather than responding to it in a way that only adds to the polarization in our country that is surely eroding our democracy.

I hope we can do better in the future.

Tom DeGise last week won reelection as Hudson County executive, a post he has held since winning a special election in 2002. He served for more than two decades as a Jersey City public schools teacher and administrator.