New York’s infamous rubber rooms went the way of the dodo this year, the city is happy to tell you.
But that would be news to former hooker Melissa Petro, the “reassigned” teacher collecting her full salary in a windowless room in Brooklyn as the Department of Education strives to fire her.
After The Post revealed her past as a Craigslist call girl in September, Petro was yanked from her Bronx classroom.
But firing tenured teachers like Petro is so hard that it led to the creation of rubber rooms, where teachers who couldn’t be allowed in classrooms were held together in limbo for days, months, years — idle but pulling down full pay.
That was supposed to end after the city and the teachers unions agreed in April to speed up disciplinary hearings and assign teachers work while they waited.
But instead of earning her keep doing chores, Petro gets paid “to sit in what amounts to detention,” she says.
Petro refuses to participate in the charade that the rubber rooms are gone. And there’s nothing the city can do about it.
“If someone refuses to do work, we can bring insubordination charges,” a DOE spokeswoman told The Post.
But the DOE wouldn’t answer questions about whether it intended to try Petro.
To be sure, the DOE did a heroic job this fall clearing out the rubber-room backlog that wastes $30 million a year.
Last summer, there were 770 rubber roomers — a number that dwindled to 236 by November and drops more each day.
It’s better than before, but the city is still caught in the bureaucratic labyrinth that created the mess in the first place.
The result: Rubber rooms were abolished, but they never really went away.
The DOE may end up firing Petro. But in the current stalemate, the tie still goes to the hooker, all on the taxpayer dime.