Ben Velderman, EAG News, July 23, 2014

A well-respected New York City school principal might soon be trading in her school office for a prison cell after she and her boyfriend were found trying to smuggle heroin and prescription painkillers into a maximum-security prison last Friday.

Public School 28 Principal Sadie Silver and Michael Acosta–along with Silver’s 10-year-old daughter–were at Coxsackie Correctional Facility to visit Silver’s son who “is doing time on weapons charges at the prison,” CBS New York reports.

But the couple never got past the prison’s visitor screening room, where state police say they discovered Acosta with small balloons filled with heroin and Suboxone, a powerful, prescription-only painkiller.

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Silver and Acosta face “the same charges–two counts of possession of drugs, one count of bringing contraband into a prison and endangering the welfare of a child by having a minor with them at the time of their arrest,” NYPost.com adds.

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New York school officials have removed Silver from her job as principal, where she reportedly earns $129,920 a year, and “reassigned her to an administrative center away from students” pending the outcome of the case, NYDailyNews.com reports.

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Silver’s arrest comes as a shock to New York education observers. The 40-year-old was seen as an “up-and-coming school leader who overcame her own troubled childhood to serve the children in the community where she grew up,” reports NYDailyNews.com.

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