A Massachusetts elementary school teacher has been charged with sexual assaulting students during school hours.
Noah Campbell-Halley, 36, is a technology teacher at the Stony Brook Elementary School in Brewster.
He was arrested by Brewster Police on Thursday following an investigation sparked by concerned parents who came to the police with information about “inappropriate sexual contact between their child” and Campbell-Halley, the police said.
Through their investigation, police conducted with forensic interviews with two potential victims, gathering enough evidence, they said, to obtain an arrest warrant.
Campbell-Halley was arraigned in Orleans District Court Thursday on three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child, two counts of rape of a child and one count of intimidating a witness, the Cape Cod Times reports. He plead not guilty and was ordered held on $25,000 bail.
The students Campbell-Halley allegedly raped were both in first grade, the Times reports. According to a police report obtained by the Times, these students told officers during the investigation that Campbell-Halley would take them and other students into a windowless, small room off of the computer lab classroom.
“Directly off of [his] classroom is a smaller room that the police refer to as a server room,” a prosecutor said at the arraignment. “That room is what we characterize as the room in question, that several of the kids describe as the ‘dark room’ where the defendant would take these students and where the touching would take place.”
Police ran a background check on Campbell-Halley during their investigation, according to the Times, and uncovered that in 2010, while working at The Children’s Place in Eastham, he was suspected of committing indecent assault and battery on a 4-year-old.
“You’re looking at our most vulnerable population and a person in a position of trust,” Brewster Chief of Police Heath J. Eldredge told NECN. “As a parent myself, it’s a difficult case to get through but it’s our role to have an impartial stance.”
The investigation in ongoing and police are working with the Nauset School Administration and the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office. Police will b meeting with parents from the area schools to keep them informed, and ask anyone with information to contact the Brewster Police Department Detective Unit at 508-896-7011.
