A longtime Hudson County teacher now serving a seven-year federal prison sentence has permanently lost his ability to work in New Jersey classrooms. The New Jersey State Board of Examiners revoked the teaching certificates of 55-year-old Anselmo Girimonte in June, formally disqualifying him from ever returning to a public school in the state he taught in for 16 years.
Girimonte spent 16 years teaching Italian to elementary and middle school students in Kearny before his arrest in 2022 on charges that he possessed child sexual assault images on his phone, according to NJ.com. His revoked credentials included authorization to teach Italian in grades 5 through 8, in addition to his elementary school certification, which the State Board of Examiners oversees as the body responsible for licensing teachers across New Jersey.
In its written decision, adopted August 7, the board found that Girimonte engaged in conduct unbecoming of an educator and permanently disqualified him from teaching in New Jersey after his convictions. Girimonte did not file a response with the board and did not request to appear before it before the vote.
How Investigators Tracked Him Down
The case traces back to undercover monitoring of a public peer-to-peer file-sharing network, where federal investigators detected activity tied to an IP address at Girimonte's Wharton home between December 2021 and January 2022, sharing files identified as child sexual abuse material. The U.S. Attorney's Office said the IP address used to send the videos had previously been traced back to him. When investigators searched his Wharton home in 2022, they found more than 100 photos and videos on his phone.
U.S. Attorney Paul Sellinger credited Homeland Security Investigations Newark, the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office, Rockaway Township Police Department, and U.S. Postal Inspection Service with assisting in the case. Girimonte was arrested on March 4, 2022, and consented to pre-trial detention, remaining held without bail in federal custody throughout the entirety of his case, according to ICE.
Guilty Plea and Sentencing
In April 2024, Girimonte pleaded guilty to one count of possession of prepubescent child pornography and one count of distribution of child pornography. Before that plea, he had faced a statutory maximum of up to 40 years in federal prison and $500,000 in fines across both counts, with the distribution count alone carrying a mandatory minimum of five years, per the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of New Jersey.
He was sentenced in September 2024 to seven years in federal prison followed by 10 years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $68,000 in restitution to victims. Girimonte remains incarcerated at FCI Thomson, a low-security federal correctional institution in Illinois, and is scheduled for release in February 2028.
Fired Before He Was Sentenced
Girimonte's employment troubles with Kearny School District began well before his criminal case concluded. Superintendent Flora Encarnacao certified tenure charges of unbecoming conduct against him in February 2023 after he failed to report his March 2022 federal arrest to school administrators; the Commissioner’s decision described the failure as a violation of board policy, according to the New Jersey Commissioner of Education.
Girimonte never submitted a written defense. The commissioner issued a final decision on May 9, 2023, and mailed it on May 10, declaring him in default and accepting the tenure charges as admitted. The ruling ordered his dismissal. That ruling stripped him of his job less than a year before his April 17, 2024 guilty plea and more than three years before the state pulled his teaching license entirely.
Before settling in Wharton and joining the Kearny School District around 2006, Girimonte had lived in the New Jersey municipalities of Madison and Bloomfield, according to Daily Voice. The license revocation closes out a multi-year process that moved from federal cyber-investigation to local tenure proceedings to final state administrative action, ensuring he cannot legally teach in any New Jersey public school again.
