New York – from www.cbsnews.com – Melissa Petro, a New York City elementary school teacher, has been reassigned after her school discovered she was a former prostitute.

According to the New York Post, the tattooed sex worker taught art at Bronx elementary school PS 70 for three years and managed to keep her past life a secret from parents and faculty.

The revelation occurred when the 30-year-old wrote an online article in The Huffington Post on Sept. 7 criticizing popular online classified Craigslist for removing its “adult services” section, which carried sex-related advertising, reports The New York Times.

“From October 2006 to January 2007 I accepted money in exchange for sexual services I provided to men I met online in what was then called the ‘erotic services’ section of Craigslist.org,” Petro said in her article.

She wrote that she found being a prostitute “physically demanding, emotionally taxing and spiritually bankrupting,” and gave it up after a few months.

Petro was hired as a teacher for PS 70 in August 2007 and had reached tenure, Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, wrote in an e-mail Sunday to The New York Times.

Ravitz said Petro had been reassigned pending an inquiry by the special commissioner of investigation for the city schools and declined the paper any further comment.

from www.nypress.com – The question is not why a former sex-worker would become a popular, tenured art teacher at PS 70 in the Bronx. The question is not why a teacher who used to be a sex-worker would choose to document her experiences in the industry. The question is why it took everyone so long to put the ever-so-Google-able pieces together.

Melissa Petro is the Godzilla of the net. Her online footprint is pretty damn noticeable. She is one of the ladies writing for the Dirty Girl’s Diary, a helpful site offering first person accounts and advice for all the dirty girls of the world. She writes floaty, stream-of-consciousness blogs about her time stripping at La Trampa in as a 19 year-old studying abroad in Mexico. She relishes the debate that results from her coworkers Googling her. For the net-illiterate, she is featured in the proudly titled anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys. She even took this work on tour, reading from this book to raucous laughter and applause at a series of dusky nightclubs.

But only by mourning the death of the erotic services section on craigslist and recalling a time when she “accepted money in exchange for sexual services” from the men she met online could Melissa really get noticed. Outrage and shock from parents desirous of a better role model forced the Department of Education to redistribute her. In a world of fast, easy connections and swelling online presences, it is really shocking that the past took so long to screw the present for Melissa Petro.