A lawsuit has been filed against a New Jersey school district, alleging it failed to address a bullying incident and attempted to silence the victim’s family. The case involves a 13-year-old student who, according to the lawsuit, experienced racial and homophobic bullying during his time at Montclair Public Schools, as reported by NorthJersey.com.

The student and his family claim the district not only ignored the bullying but also supported a counterclaim against them, seemingly as a tactic to deter them from reporting further incidents. Lawrence Kleiner, the family’s attorney, stated, “They made his life a living hell in that school. The board did nothing except turn around and blame him.”

As of now, Montclair Public Schools have not provided a comment regarding the allegations when contacted by The Post. The family’s lawsuit highlights ongoing concerns about how schools handle bullying and the measures they take to protect students.

“They made his life a living hell in that school,” Kleiner told the local outlet. “The board did nothing except turn around and blame him.”

The Montclair Public Schools district did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

The student’s turmoil began during the 2022-23 school year when he entered the Northeast Elementary School, where students began harassing him and calling him their “wife,” the complaint alleges.

Things escalated as the bullies began to taunt him with homophobic slurs and physically assault him, including incidents where they would kick him in his genitals, the lawsuit claims.

Kleiner said his client does not identify as queer, but the attacks on the victim continued all the same as they also targeted him for being Asian.

While the bullying initially began with one or two kids, Kleiner said others began joining in, hurling slurs at the boy and even doing an “Asian rap” video mocking his ethnicity.

The family claims that when they submitted Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying (HIB) reports, the district was slow to respond and eventually ruled that there was no evidence to support their claims.

As the victim’s family fought to appeal the case, they were hit by a counterclaim from the family of a student implicated in one of the bullying incidents.

Despite shooting down all the claims from the victim’s family, the claim made against them was immediately upheld by the board, in what Kleiner said was a clear intimidation tactic from the district.

The board voted twice to uphold the claim against the victim despite the recommendation of the then-superintendent and testimony from a psychiatrist that the boy was suffering from trauma and stress, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit against the district comes months after the district’s former anti-bullying coordinator, Maggie Shaver-Dock, filed her own complaint claiming the district falsified and stymied bullying cases to reduce the amount of reports it had to file with the New Jersey Department of Education.

Shaver-Dock alleges that she was ordered to alter assessments made during the 2022-23 school year at Northeast, and when she refused, then-Superintendent Jonathan Ponds, who died last year, made the changes himself.

The former employee and the district were referred to negotiate a potential settlement on Nov. 3, just a day before the family of the bullying victim filed their lawsuit at Superior Court.