Paul Rooney swept floors, scrubbed bathrooms and tidied classrooms at Schuyler Elementary School in Kearny for 35 years before retiring in 2025. Along the way, his family says, he was paid about $15,000 less per year than his co-workers doing the same basic job — a disparity that led to a lawsuit and, this past September, a $185,000 settlement with the Kearny School District.
Rooney has intellectual disabilities that trace back to a boyhood accident in which he fell from a chair and struck his head, afterward developing epilepsy, according to the lawsuit detailed by NJ.com. He reads at the level of an 8- or 9-year-old, walked six blocks to work from his parents' home each day, and, per his brother Michael Rooney, never once faced discipline during his time at the school. The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Hudson County, accused the district of exploiting Rooney and his vulnerabilities in violation of New Jersey's Law Against Discrimination.
According to the suit, Rooney's family didn't discover the pay gap until January 2025, while helping him prepare for retirement. They allege the district imposed a less generous individual contract on him near the end of his career that capped his salary at $45,000 a year — even though his paychecks still carried regular deductions for union dues, despite Rooney apparently not being represented by the Kearny School Employees Association. Kearny's unionized custodians, the family's suit says, performed the same basic duties Rooney did while earning far more.
How the Numbers Stack Up
The lawsuit alleged Rooney's pay was lower than that of his unionized co-workers and estimated that, accounting for lost wages and future pension earnings, he was shortchanged more than $200,000 over the course of his career.
National and state wage benchmarks offer broader context for Rooney's alleged $45,000 salary cap.
Kearny school officials denied mistreating Rooney, and the district admitted no wrongdoing as part of the settlement, saying the agreement was made solely to avoid the inconvenience and cost of litigation. The payout was covered by the district's insurer, and NJ.com obtained the settlement terms through a public records request.
'Just Get What Is Right and Proper'
Attorney Eric Kleiner, who represented Rooney's family, said the settlement will help make Rooney whole in the years to come, adding that Paul can move on now, enjoying in comfort his well-deserved retirement. Michael Rooney, Paul's brother, said simply that they just want to get what is right and proper. Before his retirement, Schuyler Elementary School had publicly acknowledged Rooney's decades of service on its official district feed, wishing him good health and happiness and saying the school community would miss him.
This isn't the first time Kleiner has brought this kind of case against a New Jersey school district. He previously secured a $150,000 settlement in January 2025 against the Bloomfield School District on behalf of David Quinlan, a 72-year-old janitor with intellectual disabilities who spent 35 years working as a per-diem employee without health benefits, a pension, vacation days or sick leave, according to CleanLink. Bloomfield, like Kearny, denied wrongdoing in that settlement.
A Broader Push for Pay Equity
New Jersey's Law Against Discrimination offers broader protections than the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, barring employers from paying workers less or withholding equal benefits because of a physical or mental impairment, according to the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Under that law, employees who prevail in disability pay cases can recover back pay, future lost pension earnings, emotional distress damages and mandatory attorney's fees when employers show willful indifference to discriminatory pay structures, according to Mashel Law LLC.
The state has also been moving to close gaps in the law itself. New Jersey eliminated subminimum wage exemptions for workers with disabilities on July 1, 2024, even as the federal government withdrew its own plans to phase out federal Section 14(c) subminimum wage certificates in 2025, per NJBIA. This year, state lawmakers introduced Assembly Bill 5179 and Senate Bill 2172, aiming to permanently ban special state permits that authorize subminimum wages based on age, disability or apprentice status.
Advocates say cases like Rooney's reflect a wider pattern. A policy report from the New Jersey Council on Developmental Disabilities found that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities continue to face barriers to integrated, fair-wage employment, and urged stronger state oversight and more transparent wage tracking. Nationally, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities stood at 7.2 percent in 2023 — double the 3.5 percent rate for workers without disabilities, according to the National Down Syndrome Society, underscoring just how rare steady, decades-long employment like Rooney's really is, and how vulnerable it can be to exploitation.
