Teacher sues city after being fired for affair with runway model student

Her boy toy may have been a stud, but he was no student.

A Queens teacher fired for bedding a 17-year-old male model is suing to win her job back, saying she had no idea her lover boy was enrolled in high school during their affair.

Gina Salamino, 37, contends her job as a tenured second-grade teacher at Public School 121 should have been spared because Joshua Walter was so busy catwalking he never attended a single class during the 2006-07 school year.

"They have no case," Salamino angrily told the Daily News. "There is no improper relationship."

Salamino maintains in Manhattan Supreme Court documents that it's "complete fiction" and "ludicrous" for the Department of Education to insist the globetrotting runway star was a "student" when he hooked up with the teacher, who was then 34.

"In support of this, she cites the dictionary definition of ‘student' as ‘one who attends a school,'" court records say.

The affair was hardly short-lived - they live together in Queens and have a child.

A hearing officer in June ordered Salamino to be dismissed after finding her guilty of sexual misconduct - a decision her lawyers want overturned.

"It was irrational and not based on adequate or substantial evidence in the record," Salamino's suit says.

A lawyer for Salamino, through a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, declined to comment.

Walter, now 19, met Salamino in 2002, when he was 12. He saw her again, records show, at an August 2006 party. That flirty encounter led to dates at the movies, hundreds of phone calls, nights at her Howard Beach apartment and sex.

"I thought it was her nephew or something," a former neighbor said. "He was young, and he looked like a kid."

By then, Walter had launched a modeling career that has taken him around the world, landed him gigs with Hugo Boss and H&M - and kept him far from Bryant High School in Long Island City, where he was enrolled while romancing Salamino.

"[Salamino] claims that the...allegation that she engaged in sexual misconduct, merely because Joshua's name happened to remain on a school roster ‘is ludicrous,'" the hearing officer's report says.

The lean, mop-haired teen, a star of the Hugo Boss 2008 spring campaign, has modeled in Milan, Paris, at New York's Fashion Week and been featured in glossy magazines around the world.

In a video posted on YouTube, Walter describes himself as a "regular guy" who wants to "live in today."

"I like to eat, I like to watch sports, play sports, know what I mean?" he says. "Chill with my girlfriend, know what I mean?"

Schools investigators began looking into the affair in November 2006, records show, after receiving a tip that Salamino had been seen kissing and hugging a much younger male.

More calls followed, including one from an unidentified person who confronted Walter in disgust over the affair, says a school investigator's report obtained under the state's Freedom of Information Law.

"'I'm tapping that a-- and there's nothing you can do about it,'" the teen responded, says the report from Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon.

In a written statement to investigators, Walter said he considered Salamino to be "my shorty."

Walter's mom was as defiant as her son when she insisted to school investigators that he was not "romantically involved" with the teacher.

"What difference would it make?" she told probers, the report says. "[Student A] is [redacted] years of age and no longer in school, so it would not be illegal."

New York State law requires students to remain in school through the school year in which they turn 17.

So Walter had to wait until the end of the 2006-07 school year, when he attended no classes, to be formally discharged as a student, even though he attended only 15 days of school the previous year.