"A New Jersey special education teacher was suspended for nine days and will be docked a pay raise for comments that were caught on a secretly recorded video.
Alissa Ploshnick was due to return to work Friday after being punished over comments that appeared in an online video dubbed
- "Teachers Unions Gone Wild."
The undercover footage was shot at a New Jersey Education Association leadership conference in the summer and was released by James O'Keefe III, who posed as a pimp in a video that brought down the ACORN group.
- Ploshnick is heard on the tape saying how hard it is to fire tenured teachers and relays a story about a teacher who had used the "N'' word to a student and was not fired.
Passaic Superintendent Robert Holster told The Star-Ledger of Newark he considered bringing a harsher punishment of tenure charges. Holster said Ploshnick's comments were "professionally insulting" and not "the responsible behavior of a professional person employed by the Passaic Board of Education."
- The superintendent said the incident that Holster described did not occur in Passaic.
"Passaic is multicultural and everyone has to be extremely sensitive in their thinking if they're on our payroll," he told the newspaper.
An NJEA spokesman told the newspaper that Ploshnick, who
- once was named "Teacher of the Year,"
deeply regrets what she said. Steve Wollmer said an "operative" bought Ploshnick drinks and secretly recorded her at the bar, engaging her in
- what she thought was a "social" conversation.
Ploshnick did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment.
A message left for her on Facebook was not immediately returned and the superintendent could not be reached because the
- district was closed for Veterans Day."
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