Two teacher aides were injured Monday, months after a student was wounded in a separate attack at the same address.
NEW YORK — The slashing of two teacher aides Monday marked the second reported incident involving a sharp weapon in several months at the William Howard Taft Educational Campus in the Bronx, a building shared by multiple public schools.
Police said a 17-year-old student attacked a 53-year-old aide shortly after 10 a.m. during a dispute at the East 172nd Street campus. A 30-year-old aide was cut on his hand while trying to intervene. Both employees were taken to BronxCare Health with injuries described as minor.
The student left before police arrived and was being sought in the initial investigation. Authorities said he had been carrying a blue backpack and was wearing a black shirt and blue sweater. Police did not release his name or say what caused the dispute.
The confrontation followed a separate incident reported at the campus in April. In that case, police said a 15-year-old student slashed another 15-year-old in the face shortly before 1 p.m. The injured student was taken to a hospital in stable condition, and the accused student was taken into custody at the school.
The two cases occurred about three months apart, but authorities have not suggested that they were connected. The students involved were different ages, and no information released after Monday’s attack indicated that the earlier case played any role in the new confrontation.
The Taft property is commonly described as a high school, but it functions as a large shared campus. New York City school records identify several schools and specialized programs at 240 East 172nd Street, including programs serving middle and high school students as well as students receiving special education services.
Schools listed at the address include the Bronx High School for Medical Science, the Bronx High School of Business, New Directions Secondary School and the Bronx School for Continuous Learners. Other programs also operate within the campus. The former William Howard Taft High School closed years ago, but the building retained the Taft name.
The shared structure complicates efforts to determine which school was directly affected by an emergency. Initial reports about Monday’s attack did not identify the student’s program or the school employing the injured aides. Police and education officials also had not said whether students from other programs were nearby.
One report about the April case said the building screened people for weapons. Teachers said the campus was placed under a brief lockdown while officers searched for the student accused in that attack. No comparable lockdown or security response was described in the initial accounts of Monday’s incident.
The available information does not establish whether either object was brought through a campus entrance, obtained elsewhere in the building or missed during any screening process. Authorities described the object used Monday as something believed to be a scalpel, but they had not announced that a weapon was recovered.
School security procedures often involve several agencies and employees, including school administrators, city school safety agents and the Police Department. No agency had publicly announced a review of the campus response or any immediate change in screening practices after Monday’s confrontation.
The two incidents are likely to bring new attention to how a large campus responds when students from several schools share entrances, hallways and common spaces. Still, the limited facts released so far do not show that the same security failure contributed to both cases.
Police continued searching for the 17-year-old in the latest case Tuesday. The two aides were expected to recover, while key questions about the dispute, the object used and the student’s path out of the campus remained unanswered.
Author note: Last updated July 28, 2026.