NJ Education Report

Last month, say new charges, a teacher’s aide assigned to students with disabilities pushed a seven-year-old boy down a flight of stairs at Quitman School in Newark.

According to a tort claim –a notice of a pending lawsuit –pressed by the mother, whose son has been diagnosed with autism, the aide “viciously assaulted” her child and a classroom teacher witnessed the beating. “Hopefully she will be completely truthful in her account of what transpired,” the notice states.

This was first reported by the Star-Ledger.

The mother first took her son to the doctor, who advised her to call the police and take him to an emergency room. According to the Ledger, responding officers wrote in the report they saw bruises on the child’s back, chin and arms and that he “suffered an injury to his tooth, which was bleeding as well.” Also, the child told his mother that the aide “used an open hand to push him to the floor, dragged him and pushed him down the stairs, according to the police report.”

According to the State Department of Education database, 31% of Quitman School’s students are eligible for special education services, twice the district average. Student academic proficiency is extremely low and more than half the K-8 student body is chronically absent.