A New York City public schools aide was arrested Thursday after police said he dragged a 6-year-old boy through the cafeteria at P.S. 184 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, leaving the child with bruising to both arms. The aide, 38-year-old Claude Pierce, was charged with assault and endangering the welfare of a child following the altercation, which police say happened around 12:30 p.m. at the school on Newport Street near Mother Gaston Boulevard.
The boy was treated at a local hospital for his injuries, according to police, as reported by the New York Daily News. Pierce faced charges in connection with the incident.
NYC Public Schools policy, outlined in a regulation known as A-411, states that school staff working in schools may not use physical restraints, according to schools.nyc.gov. Separate guidance from the department says staff should rely on relationship skills, de-escalation techniques and behavioral-management strategies when responding to students in crisis, per the agency's published guidance on responding to behavioral crises.
Part of a Troubling Pattern in Schools
The Brownsville case follows other recent incidents involving school employees accused of physically mistreating students. In Schenectady, a 47-year-old aide named Eva Buchanan pleaded guilty earlier this week to endangering the welfare of a child after being recorded mistreating a nonverbal autistic student, according to syracuse.com. That outlet reported the case was the third this year involving a district employee facing criminal or professional consequences after being caught on video mistreating a student, and separately noted that special education teacher Patti Tashman pleaded guilty after surveillance video showed her dragging a kindergartner with behavioral issues from a classroom and stomping on the child.
A similar case surfaced last month in Kentucky, where an instructional assistant at Latonia Elementary School in Covington was arrested after video allegedly showed him kicking, dragging and slinging a 5-year-old child, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. A police report in that case said the aide, identified as Bryan Bundy, grabbed the child's arm, dragged him across a hallway, slung him toward a concrete wall and kicked him toward the wall. The Covington school district said afterward that the former instructional assistant was no longer employed by the district and that it was cooperating with police.
No video of the Brownsville incident has been independently verified, and the precise manner in which the boy was dragged through the P.S. 184 cafeteria has not been established beyond the police account relayed by the Daily News. The outcome of Pierce's arraignment, including any bail decision or plea, remained unknown as of Thursday.
