Reached by phone, the boy’s mother declined to comment.

Just after the school day ended on Wednesday, a 12-year-old student named Joseph said he was in the room when the boy’s mouth was taped and described what happened. To him, the episode was harmless.

Image Kenyatte Hughes

“He was just playing around,” Joseph said, standing near a mural at the corner of Vermont and Pitkin Avenues with the Soul Tigers’ name. The boy was speaking and Mr. Hughes, Joseph continued, “said, ‘Can you give me a chance to talk?’ He said it in a nice way: ‘You can’t talk when I’m talking.’”

Mr. Hughes, Joseph added, said, “I’m about to put tape on your mouth,” and as he did so, the boy was laughing. When Mr. Hughes finished speaking, he removed the tape, Joseph said, and the boy seemed to be fine.

“I don’t get how it went that far,” Joseph said of the arrest. “He’s like a father,” he added of Mr. Hughes. “He teaches us how to do right.”

Lawayne Smalls, 12, a seventh grader at I.S. 292, said he enjoyed having Mr. Hughes as a band instructor. “When I used to go to band and when I had trouble, he’d help me with the instruments and the notes,” he said.

When students misbehaved, Lawayne said, Mr. Hughes would “yell at them and make them do push-ups.”

Lawayne’s mother, Doreen Brooks, said that demanding a few push-ups did not seem unreasonable, but that if Mr. Hughes was enforcing discipline by taping children’s mouths shut, that would be another matter. “For him to do something like that, he shouldn’t be here,” she said.

Mr. Hughes, who grew up in Brooklyn, played trumpet and tenor drum in an earlier incarnation of the Soul Tigers starting in third grade. Over time, though, the program faded away. As for Mr. Hughes, after serving in the Marine Corps, he returned to Brooklyn and restarted the band program at I.S. 292, where his father, Everett Hughes, was the principal until he retired in 2011. In January, the younger Mr. Hughes said school administrators were trying to force him out.