BUFFALO CITY COURT
School aide resigns, avoids jail in clash with pupil
The teacher’s aide who threw a seventh-grader against a classroom wall in Futures Academy School 37 was spared a jail term but forced to resign Friday.
Buffalo City Judge Kevin J. Keane granted James Wilson, 44, of Floss Avenue, a conditional discharge but fined him $200 and ordered him to perform 50 hours of community service through City Court’s innovative Courts Program over the next month.
At the request of prosecutor Matthew A. Albert, the judge also issued a one-year order of protection for the 13-year-old boy.
Wilson pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge of attempted child endangerment and signed his resignation letter in the courtroom. Keane then warned him that if he attempts to contact the boy or any member of his family over the next year, he faces a one-year jail term.
Keane had been scheduled Friday to begin the nonjury trial that Wilson had demanded on misdemeanor harassment and child endangerment counts. But public defender Dean E. Lilac worked out a last-minute plea deal with the prosecutor.
Albert told the judge he had contacted the boy, and both he and his mother “were amenable” to the plea deal.
The boy suffered bruises on his back during the encounter in the Carlton Street school.
In Keane’s courtroom, a Buffalo Public Schools official who refused to identify herself wrote out the resignation letter Wilson signed moments before pleading guilty to the reduced charge, which carried a possible 90-day jail term and a $500 fine.
Wilson had been free on $2,500 bail since his arrest in mid-August on misdemeanor counts that carried a possible one-year jail term.
He declined comment as he left the courtroom.
Albert said Wilson had entered the boy’s classroom without permission at about 11 a. m. June 23 and accused the boy of making a derogatory remark about him earlier that day.
As they argued, the boy threw a chair at Wilson that missed him.
According to police reports, Wilson then grabbed the boy’s shirt and pushed him across the room.
Wilson kept pushing the boy against the wall and a cabinet and threatened him before leaving the classroom, according to police reports.
Neither the boy nor his mother was in court Friday for the plea proceedings.
According to public records, Wilson, who has a minor criminal record, had been hired as a teacher’s aide in November 1998 and was assigned last year to a special-education classroom at the Futures Academy.
