Students Walk Out; Perth Amboy Teachers Warned Of Violence In Schools

PERTH AMBOY, NJ — On Monday, the entire student body of Perth Amboy High School walked out of class, as students and teachers alike say there is a serious lack of safety in the school district.

The protest was in response to last Wednesday's stabbing, where police say an 11-year-old sixth grader stabbed a fifth grader with a kitchen knife at 2:30 in the afternoon as the younger boy walked home from Samuel E. Shull Middle School.

It was an attack so serious that Middlesex County Prosecutor Yolanda Ciccone said the older boy would have been charged with attempted murder if he were an adult.

The fifth grader remains hospitalized. The 11-year-old boy accused of doing the stabbing had a detention hearing last Thursday and it was determined he would remain detained at the Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Center.

The stabbing comes two weeks after the head of the Perth Amboy teachers' union said she expressed concerns to superintendent David Roman specifically about school safety.

"We told the district that Shull school was out of control," said union rep Patricia Paradiso, who is also a Perth Amboy school teacher. "I sent a letter written by a Shull school teacher who resigned detailing the conditions in the school on February 2. I also spoke about the conditions at Shull at the Board meeting on February 9."

At midday on Monday, all the Perth Amboy high school students walked out of class and marched the four blocks to Schull School, where they stood outside. Parents will again protest at 5:45 p.m. Monday outside Perth Amboy City Hall.

"The purpose of this isn't to skip class. It's a call to action," read a social media posts from students encouraging the walk-out.

“My daughter sees fights every day, blood every day," mom Wendy Celeron told News 12 New Jersey. "It's not safe. It needs to change, and it needs to change now."

"You don't know if you're going to get jumped in the school. You don't know what's going to happen,” middle school student Brieanne Celeron told News 12.

The students and teachers also said the superintendent is not doing enough to curb the violence in the school district. Roman has yet to speak publicly on the matter.

Paradiso provided Patch with that Feb. 2 letter from the sixth-grade Perth Amboy math teacher who resigned, saying she fears for her safety, and here are excerpts:

"Shull School is in extreme crisis ... I am writing this letter to convey just how badly conditions have deteriorated at Shull Middle School. After being an employee of Perth Amboy Public Schools for the last 10 and a half years, I made the decision to officially resign on 12/22/22. The tipping point for me, was how extremely unsafe the environment is inside Shull, and because of the dangerous environment I was injured by a student on 12/7/22.

Students are engaging in extremely violent activities. They are cutting class to roam the halls, kicking doors so hard that pieces of the solid wood doors are breaking off in chunks. They are boxing, wrestling, running, stampeding and jumping on each other in the hallways as administrators are standing dead center of the hall. These administrators do nothing to stop it, as teachers desperately call out to remind students to walk, keep hands to themselves, etc. and get cursed out and told off by these students.

When teachers get run into, hit, kicked or punched and injured by these students, nothing is done to reprimand the students responsible, and the behaviors escalate. At least five teachers that I know of, including myself, have been injured by students because of these behaviors. When teenagers in adult-sized bodies are running around the building like 5-year-olds on a playground, students and staff get injured and administration at all levels seems to not care at all that the hallways and stairwells are extremely unsafe when 1,300+ students are behaving like this all at the same time.

Students are actively cutting classes to stalk peers they wish to fight. Storming into classrooms to taunt their victims into leaving the safety of the classroom in order to go into the hallway to be beaten up. When teachers write up the students cutting class and report the intentions of the child to hunt down their victim to fight, admin deletes the write-up and says the child was with them the entire time and should not have been written up for cutting. This gives the students cutting class tacit permission to continue to cut class day after day to continue to stalk and taunt their targeted victim until they get to fight that poor child.

Then we have the roving groups of students who somehow are cutting classes all day long every single day to roam the hallways screaming, yelling, making animal noises, tapping on classroom windows to wave at students in classes, or opening doors to walk in disrupt instruction and then leave. No wonder we have students physically attacking teachers in our building, they know that there will be no real consequences.

Something needs to be done immediately to address the situation."

Perth Amboy Boy, 11, Stabbed By Fellow Student Is In Stable Condition (Feb. 24)