A highly touted Brooklyn principal was yanked from her post Monday, three days after state police caught her trying to smuggle heroin into a maximum-security prison upstate with a 10-year-old in tow, city education officials said.
Public School 28 Principal Sadie Silver, 40, of Bushwick, was arrested Friday with Michael Acosta, 34, after cops caught the educator and her partner carrying heroin and prescription drugs into Coxsackie Correctional Facility.
Silver and Acosta face felony charges of promoting prison contraband and criminal possession of a controlled substance, as well as a misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child, since they had a 10-year-old with them when they were collared.
State Police Maj. Patrick Regan said Silver and Acosta had arrived for a previously arranged visit with an inmate at the 1,000-inmate prison for men in Greene County, where they intended to pass off the drugs.
“Silver and Acosta were found to possess a quantity of heroin and suboxone, which they were attempting to deliver to the inmate,” Regan said in a statement. “Silver and Acosta brought a 10-year-old child with them while they attempted to deliver the narcotics.”
The two would-be smugglers were both released on bond. They each face possible prison time if convicted of their alleged crimes.
City education officials removed Silver from her job after hearing of her arrest and reassigned her to an administrative center away from students.
“We’ve reassigned her away from her school pending the outcome of her case,” said Education Department spokeswoman Margie Feinberg. Silver will continue to draw her salary of $129,920.
Before her arrest, Silver was known as an up-and-coming school leader who overcame her own troubled childhood to serve the children in the community where she grew up.
In a 2012 Daily News profile, Silver explained that she was a teen mother who dropped out of high school, but rose above those challenges to earn two master’s degrees. She has worked in city schools since 1996.
“It was the teachers that believed in me, that got me to where I am today,” Silver said in the article, which praised gains in reading scores at the school under her leadership.
But that year, Silver was slapped with a $1,500 fine by the city Conflict of Interest Board for using her position to land her brother a data-entry job at her school.
Reached at home in Bushwick Monday, Silver’s mother, Denise Ortiz, 57, was still reeling in shock over her daughter’s arrest.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Ortiz, who wouldn’t reveal the nature of Silver’s relationship with Acosta, or identify the child who was traveling with them when they were pinched. “She went to college and I taught her to do the right thing. Her record speaks for itself.”
A relative who answered the door at Acosta’s home said Acosta is Silver’s boyfriend and the child they brought with them to the jail is Silver’s daughter.
“He’s been trying to stay away from trouble,” the relative said of Acosta.
