An Upper East Side public-school teacher claims her supervisors retaliated against her for not accepting lavish gifts from parents — a common practice at the posh school.
Valencia Garrett, a 20-year veteran educator, was canned from PS 183 last month, allegedly for poor performance and other misdeeds.
But she claims in a Manhattan lawsuit that her reviews started tanking only after she refused to accept a $500 cash gift from parents in late 2009 and a $675 gift certificate the next year.
“It was customary at our school [to give] a nominal gift from the entire class of . . . 26 to 28 students,” one mom admitted at Garrett’s termination hearing. “Yes, $500 sounds like a lot of money, but based on all of those students it’s really not very much money.”
Garrett, 40, filed a complaint with the Department of Education at the time, since regulations forbid such gift-giving.
That same year, she got a bad rating for allegedly failing to get field-trip permission slips signed for all her students. DOE officials said their 2010 probe found no wrongdoing.