The equipment for this flight is a Boeing 717. There are at least two floor plans for the B-717: A one-class layout, and a two-class layout. The two class layout shows 8 "high class" seats (two rows) in the forward cabin, followed by a bulkhead, followed by the coach section. Attempting to book a seat on this flight at airtran-dot-com gave me the choice of coach class or business class. So AirTran seems to use the two-class layout. This is consistent with the story.
FWIW.
This article about substantive investigation into the incident was quite convincing.
He interviewed 7 people directly involved, including 2 law enforcment personnel. He also had comments from airline personnel:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17508