Montclair Public Schools mishandled bully case: lawsuit

A New Jersey school district has been accused of ignoring a child’s bullying case and trying to silence his family from speaking out about it, according to a new lawsuit.

The now 13-year-old plaintiff, who is not named in the lawsuit, claims board members at Montclair Public Schools did nothing to help him during his one and only year in the district, where he faced constant racial and homophobic attacks, NorthJersey.com reported.

The boy and his family alleged that the district not only tried to sweep his case under the rug — but they also backed a claim made against the family to scare them from filing any more reports against his bullies, attorney Lawrence Kleiner said.

“They made his life a living hell in that school,” Kleiner told the local outlet. “The board did nothing except turn around and blame him.”

The Montclair Public Schools district did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

The student’s turmoil began during the 2022-23 school year when he entered the Northeast Elementary School, where students began harassing him and calling him their “wife,” the complaint alleges.

Things escalated as the bullies began to taunt him with homophobic slurs and physically assault him, including incidents where they would kick him in his genitals, the lawsuit claims.

Kleiner said his client does not identify as queer, but the attacks on the victim continued all the same as they also targeted him for being Asian.

While the bullying initially began with one or two kids, Kleiner said others began joining in, hurling slurs at the boy and even doing an “Asian rap” video mocking his ethnicity.

The family claims that when they submitted Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying (HIB) reports, the district was slow to respond and eventually ruled that there was no evidence to support their claims.

As the victim’s family fought to appeal the case, they were hit by a counterclaim from the family of a student implicated in one of the bullying incidents.

Despite shooting down all the claims from the victim’s family, the claim made against them was immediately upheld by the board, in what Kleiner said was a clear intimidation tactic from the district.

The board voted twice to uphold the claim against the victim despite the recommendation of the then-superintendent and testimony from a psychiatrist that the boy was suffering from trauma and stress, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit against the district comes months after the district’s former anti-bullying coordinator, Maggie Shaver-Dock, filed her own complaint claiming the district falsified and stymied bullying cases to reduce the amount of reports it had to file with the New Jersey Department of Education.

Shaver-Dock alleges that she was ordered to alter assessments made during the 2022-23 school year at Northeast, and when she refused, then-Superintendent Jonathan Ponds, who died last year, made the changes himself.

The former employee and the district were referred to negotiate a potential settlement on Nov. 3, just a day before the family of the bullying victim filed their lawsuit at Superior Court.