MINNESOTA – A single mother in Minnesota said she was fired from her school job after a 60-year-old coworker complained to their boss about a joke she made on TikTok, according to the New York Post.
Nicole Johnson, 29, who had served for eight years as a special education paraprofessional at a Minnesota school was let go in May after school administrators called a video she posted on the social media platform “unprofessional,” the mom said in recent TikTok videos.
The names of the school and school district were not revealed in the story.
The trouble apparently began when Johnson posted a video of herself on May 14 sipping a Starbucks iced coffee with the caption “Me telling my coworkers there is no way I can come in early cause I have kids but yet I arrive with a Starbucks daily.” To watch the video, click here.
She got her pink slip from her job just five days later with less than two weeks left in the school year, Johnson said.
The paraprofessional — who is finishing her degree to become a special ed teacher — said she was called into a meeting with human resource administrators who showed her a printed out photo of her TikTok from someone’s phone. Johnson said she could tell the phone belonged to her 60+ coworker.
She has since said that in retrospect she was being “stupid” for posting what she thought was a silly video.
“I put this TikTok out there didn’t like think anyone was gonna do anything with it,” she said in an Aug. 11 TikTok.video.
“I didn’t think I could get fired because I didn’t think it was unprofessional. It doesn’t swear, it’s not negative, it’s not harassing, it’s literally just me being like ‘I can’t come into work early, but I have a Starbucks.”
She explained that the HR staffers from her school told her the Starbucks video was a “slap in the face” for her co-workers and claimed that Johnson’s use of the “FYP” hashtag meant “F*** you people” was aimed at her colleagues.
But the acronym is widely used on TikTok to represent the app’s “for your page.”
In another video, Johnson said that worst part of being fired is that she’ll “never get to say goodbye” to her students. “They’ll think I just left them.”
To read the full story, click here.
