Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says she is standing by her account of being fired from her first teaching job at a New Jersey public school because she was visibly pregnant, according to a CBS News report.

Warren has recounted numerous times on the campaign trail that she worked as a speech pathologist in the Riverdale School District in Morris County during the 1970-1971 school year in her first job after graduating from the University of Houston.

The Democrat has said the school’s principal “showed her the door” when she was six months pregnant at the end of the school year and she was told not to return.

“All I know is I was 22 years old, I was 6 months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job,” Warren told CBS News Monday night.

This was 1971, years before Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination—but we know it still happens in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We can fight back by telling our stories. I tell mine on the campaign trail, and I hope to hear yours. — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 8, 2019

Warren’s account of her time in Riverdale was questioned recently when a conservative news organization obtained documents from the school district showing the Riverdale Board of Education said it accepted her resignation in the summer of 1971.

In a CBS News interview, Warren said she was fired from the job.

Earlier this week, the Washington Free Beacon reported the local school board meeting minutes from 1971 show the school district said in the spring that it planned to rehire Warren for the following school year for the two-day-a-week speech pathologist job. Warren would have been about four months pregnant then. However, the minutes show the school board said it “accepted with regret” her resignation later that summer.

Warren said she was hiding her pregnancy when the school initially asked her in the spring of 1971 to return for the next school year, according to the CBS News report. But by the end of the school year she was six months pregnant and could no longer hide that she was having a baby.

“I was pregnant, but nobody knew it. And then a couple of months later when I was six months pregnant and it was pretty obvious, the principal called me in, wished me luck, and said he was going to hire someone else for the job,” Warren said.

Other teachers from Riverdale backed up Warren’s account that pregnant teachers were regularly asked to leave.

Trudy Randall and Sharon Ercalano, two retired teachers who worked at Riverdale Elementary, told CBS News non-tenured teachers like Warren had no protections in 1971 if they were pregnant. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act was not passed until 1978.

“The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer,” Randall told CBS News. “But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”

Warren has given different accounts of her time in Riverdale. In a 2007 interview she said she left the teaching job because she lacked the teaching credentials and she didn’t think the job was going to work out for her.

“I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ‘emergency certificate,’ it was called,” Warren said in the 2007 interview at the University of California, Berkeley. “I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me.’ I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.”

Warren told CBS News her story changed because she became more open about her past as she became a public figure.

In her 2014 memoir, Warren said she was fired. That story has become a cornerstone of her stump speech as she runs for president.

Warren went on to apply to Rutgers Law School a few years later. She graduated in 1976 and was pregnant with her second child. She became a lecturer at the law school the following year.

Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyHeyboer. Find her at KellyHeyboerReporter on Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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