Parents sue Central Bucks School District, allege ‘concerted cover-up’ of abuse

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The parents of a 10-year-old boy are suing Central Bucks School District and several of its current and former employees over what they say was a “concerted cover-up” of abuses that their child and other students suffered at the hands of instructors in an autistic support classroom at Jamison Elementary School in 2024.

James Pepper, a former school board member, and his wife, Lisa Pepper, filed the federal civil rights lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

The complaint says the couple’s son, who is nonverbal, was subject to nearly 3,000 instances of illegal restraints, water restriction, corporal punishment, forced exposure to nudity and other abuses by a teacher and educational assistant over three months in the fall of 2024.

The district failed to immediately file a ChildLine report once the allegations of abuse were reported, and then left out the full extent of the abuses once a report was filed, per the lawsuit.

The complaint also alleges that the district then “falsely” reported to the community at large that its internal investigation found no evidence of abuse, among other actions that constituted a “cover-up.”

District spokesperson Michael Petitti told WHYY News in a statement that the district “has acknowledged what occurred in Classroom 119 at Jamison Elementary School during the fall of 2024,” and “took the actions within its power to discipline both those employees who committed these offenses, and those employees who failed to report them.”

In the second half of 2025, the district fired then-Superintendent Steven Yanni, David Heineman, who was principal of Jamison Elementary School at the time, and Alyssa Wright, then-director of special education.

Yanni was first placed on administrative leave in April 2025 after an investigative report by Disability Rights Pennsylvania found the abuse allegations to be “credible and corroborated,” and that administrators’ reports of the suspected abuse to ChildLine were “incomplete and misleading.”

Per that investigation, a personal care assistant first reported allegations of abuse by the teacher and educational assistant to the district in November. The PCA said the teacher and educational assistant restrained students, restricted water, physically punished students and left one student naked for an extended period of time.

Petitti said the district has also fired the teacher and educational assistant alleged to have committed the abuse, identified in the lawsuit as Gabrielle McDaniel and Rachel Aussprung, and has “fully litigated those terminations through the arbitration process, which is ongoing.”

The district “implemented significant changes at Jamison Elementary School to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again,” Petitti said. “The Disability Rights Project returned to Jamison last year, reviewed these changes, and closed their investigation.”

“The district understands that none of these actions can change what happened to the students in Classroom 119 at Jamison,” he said. “Before the filing of the lawsuit, the district communicated to the attorneys for this family that the district was open to a resolution of their claims. The filing of the lawsuit does not change that position.”

The Peppers are seeking compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees and costs.

Their son has been diagnosed with PTSD as a result of the abuse, the lawsuit says, and “has suffered and will continue to suffer great pain of mind and body.” The couple has also “suffered emotional distress and loss of educational opportunities for their son,” per the complaint.