Metro

Teacher fired for insulting students is suing to get job back

A Queens teacher who was fired for calling his special-education students a “waste of life” and saying, “I would just wish they were dead,” wants his job back.

His reasoning? The kids never heard the insults.

In a Manhattan civil lawsuit, gym teacher Kristopher Vagianos says his June ouster was “harsh” because his remarks “were not made towards any students or within earshot of any students.”

Vagianos, 33, who is tenured, began working at the John F. Kennedy Jr. School in Maspeth in 2012. He made the comments on Jan. 30, 2013, to two teachers while pointing to autistic students, according to the Department of Education’s decision to fire him.

When one of the teachers asked Vagianos, who is a father, “What if that was your child?” he said, “If I was to have a child like that, I would just wish they were dead,” according to a DOE transcript.

At his 2013 DOE hearing, the Long Island resident claimed the charges were part of a conspiracy led by a female teacher whose romantic advances he had rebuffed.

“I don’t s- -t where I eat,” Vagianos told the hearing officer.

A city Law Department spokesman declined to comment.

Vagianos, who started with the DOE in 2003 and was making $82,000 last year, was removed from a previous school for splashing water on a student’s face and tipping a wheelchair-bound student nearly to the ground, DOE records say.