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New Rochelle settles with feds over wheelchair evacuations

Randi Weiner
rcweiner@lohud.com

NEW ROCHELLE – New Rochelle school administrators have admitted the district broke federal law in 2013 by not evacuating two students who use wheelchairs during an emergency when other students were sent out of the building.

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In a settlement with the U.S. Attorney announced Friday, the school will not pay any fines but will change its protocols in such cases.

Federal attorneys in Manhattan brought the suit Wednesday on behalf of two students attending New Rochelle High School, stating that the children had not been not removed from an upper-story hallway on Jan. 31, 2013, when firefighters were called there for smoke in an electrical service room.

Although the students were with their aides and were in what the district considered a safe place, they remained in the building while other staff members and students had been evacuated.

The federal government said the district had not followed federal Americans with Disabilities Act requirements to treat the two the same as other students in the school.

The district acknowledged that in the judgment signed Friday. The school agreed to create a safety plan for mobility-impaired students, allow all children to participate in safety drills, provide training to staff, stop discriminating against disabled children, and hire an expert to help with evacuation plans.

"The City School District of New Rochelle is fully dedicated to ensuring the safety of all students at all times. The district's expanded emergency response training already underway will fulfill the agreement reached with the US Attorney's Office," the district said in a statement Friday.

The parents of the students were not immediately available for comment.

This was not the first time the district was chastised by federal sources for the misstep. In August 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice had also faulted the district for not removing the students.

"These kids were not treated the same," Dr. Judith Martinez said at the time. She is the mother of one of the two students, Michael Martinez, then 17. "And it was just disgusting because it had been going on for years."

Rich Feltenstein, whose daughter Jennifer, a senior in 2013, was kept on the third floor during the evacuation, said that it was not until mid-April of that school year that the district granted their request to move her third-floor classes to ground-floor rooms.

"They saw that something wasn't right," he said at the time. "And my real hope for this is that no student, no child, would ever have to go through what Jennifer and Michael had to go through."