A New Jersey special-education teacher was suspended after being caught on video using a racial slur — and boasting about how hard it is for Garden State teachers to be fired.
Alissa Ploshnick — a 14-year teaching veteran who pulls in about $90,000 a year — was booted for nine days and docked a pay raise by her Passaic County Schools bosses.
Ploshnick is heard making the comments on an undercover video allegedly shot during a New Jersey Education Association leadership conference last summer.
On the video — called “Teachers Unions Gone Wild” and released on YouTube — Ploshnick is heard recounting a story about a teacher who called a student the N-word.
In telling the tale, Ploshnick herself uses the word.
Ploshnick said the teacher in question was reprimanded but not fired. She then talked about how tough it is to can someone with tenure.
“It’s really hard,” Ploshnick says. “Like, you literally have to be in the hallway f- -king somebody.”
The tape was released by activist James O’Keefe, who last year posed as a pimp to expose alleged wrongdoing by the community-activist group ACORN. Investigators later determined he selectively edited those tapes.
O’Keefe was arrested in New Orleans in January on felony charges that he and three others tried to interfere with the phone system of US Sen. Mary Landrieu.
The charges were reduced to a misdemeanor, and O’Keefe got three years’ probation.
In the New Jersey tapes, several other teachers are seen bragging about their protected posts and disparaging schools and students.
Ploshnick is one of only a few teachers identified.
Passaic Schools Superintendent Robert Holster told Newark’s Star-Ledger that the incident Ploshnick described on tape did not happen in Passaic.
A spokesman for the New Jersey teachers union said Ploshnick deeply regrets what she said.
He noted that Ploshnick thought she was having a “social” conversation at the bar — but was secretly recorded by an “operative” who bought her drinks.
Meanwhile, in another part of the tape, a crowd is heard chanting, “Kick [Christie] in the toolbox!”
Christie has proposed a “toolbox” of reforms for the state, aimed at capping property taxes.