Mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday called for the removal of a tenured teacher who admitted to a past as a hooker and stripper in articles posted online.
Melissa Petro was removed from her post as an art teacher at PS 70 last week and reassigned to administrative work. “We’re just not going to have this woman in front of a class,” Bloomberg said yesterday.
“What our legal rights are, whether she broke the law in terms of applying and getting tenure or whether the system just broke down, that’s being investigated,” he said.
The Office of Special Investigations, which examines cases of potential misconduct in city schools, is looking into possible action against the 30-year-old Ohio native after she wrote an article for the Huffington Post under her own name, in which she described working as a prostitute advertising on Craigslist. In other online posts, she has also described her work as a stripper in Ohio and Mexico.
She has hardly been secretive about her work in the sex industry. The 30-year-old has written of colleagues finding out about her past and an administrator at her Bronx school who warned her to use a pseudonym when putting such articles online.
