Teacher under fire, apologizes after making offensive gesture toward parent on Zoom call

A teacher is in hot water after she was caught making an offensive gesture towards a parent during a Zoom call.

News 12 Staff

Mar 13, 2021, 3:33 AM

Updated 1,361 days ago

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A teacher is in hot water after she was caught making an offensive gesture towards a parent during a Zoom call.
Linda Brajer was caught on video, sent to News 12, flipping her middle finger after the parent of a kindergartener asked the teacher and aide to take their complaints about the students somewhere else--aside from the Zoom classroom during a snack break.
Brajer wrote a letter to parents and students saying in part, “I made a communication mistake that I apologize for deeply. She added that children mirror adults’ actions and that it is nice to be nice.
Brajer was later off on paid leave after the incident. But parents say that it isn’t enough. A parent tells News 12 the incident happened in late February.
“They’ll do that in school when I can hear them. What do they do in school when I can’t hear them?” asked one parent who wished to remain anonymous.
“It was a slap in the face. It was patronizing. The fact that they’re telling us that it’s ‘nice to be nice.’ I don’t see that happen and I’m not 5 years old,” she says. “I really do think that [if there was] a genuine response to the incident, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“I need to know that there’s going to be a professional development for sensitivity. I need to know that my child’s not going to be abused mentally in that classroom and I can’t hear it now, so I don’t know what I’m going to do,” the parent says.
News 12 New Jersey reached out to the Roxbury School District for comment and has not heard back yet.