abc27 WHTM

CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. (WHTM) –

Jeffrey Schmutzler, the Chambersburg High School Spanish teacher accused of sexual exploitation of children, is out on $60,000 bond.

Parents of students in the district have expressed concern that the school did not inform them of Schmutzler’s arrest. Many learned of the charges from abc27 news.

Superintendent Dr. Joseph Padasak says the district was informed of Schmutzler’s arrest via fax from the Attorney General’s Office around noon on Thursday. However, they did not receive any additional information.

“They gave us no details,” said Dr. Padasak.

Padasak also said names of any alleged victims have also not been released. The district is working to keep parents better informed and are now posting information on their website (http://www.chambersburg.k12.pa.us/education/components/whatsnew/default.php?sectiondetailid=27917&viewType=detail&id=3155)

This message was posted on the site today.

“The district has no additional information at this time, but will continue to work cooperatively with state and federal investigators … Student safety is and will always be our primary concern. It is critical that students continue to feel school is a safe place full of adults they can trust. Administrators, counselors and additional staff were present in the high school today to reassure students and employees and to address any and all concerns over this matter.”

The school said any student or parent who has a concern regarding this issue, should call Principal Buddy Chapel at 717-261-3329. If you have information you believe may be relevant to this investigation please contact the Chambersburg Area School District Police Chief Paul Weachter at 377-6773.

Schmutzler is accused of taking photos of his students, Photoshopping their faces onto child pornography and distributing them .

Carlisle Attorney Jason Kutulakis works with the group ChildFirst PA, which fights child abuse and protects children’s rights.

“You send your children off to school with anticipation that they will be in a safe environment and here you have the betrayal of that trust,” said Kutulakis.

Kutulakis he says although the charges against Schmutzler do not include physical abuse it doesn’t lessen the pain, especially if the images are on the internet.

“I don’t know of any mechanism whatsoever to recall or delete these images. Unfortunately, they will be in cyber space forever and its tragic. For the duration of life these images will be out there. Hopefully if these allegations are true the punishment is swift and severe,” said Kutulakis.

Schmutzler has been a teacher in the district since 2005. He worked at Northern Middle School first and then moved to the high school.

Courtesy of ABC27

By Kendra Nichols

Last year, State Police say they investigated almost 1,500 child sex abuses in Pennsylvania. For those young victims involved, being interviewed during an investigation can be difficult.

It’s called the Child-First Program. It’s a class for those who deal with children, who are victims of crimes, and how to effectively communicate with them. Investigators and detectives were in a Derry Township classroom on Thursday, to learn how to best communicate with children, who are victims of heinous crimes.

Adams County District Attorney, Shawn Wagner says first responders are important in situations like these. “In child sexual abuse cases the first response is by far the most important one that we need, to see a crime.”

Some officials say child sex abuse crimes aren’t spoken of much. “For whatever reason, society seems to look the other way, want to ignore, or can’t believe these activities are taking place. They’re goal (investigators) is to provide services for healing and justice to the victims and holding the offenders accountable.” Said Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan.

Wagner says helping the child have a normal childhood, is important. “Our ultimate goal is to allow a child to become a child again, when they’re the victim of child abuse.”

State Police, District Attorneys and other officials say this is designed to stregthen investigations and prosecute child abuse.
“Child abuse prosecutions are tough prosecutions, but of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, only 20 have children advocacy centers, including Dauphin, Lancaster and York Counties.” Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico explained.

Those centers, provide healing for victims and a commonplace between them and doctors, nurses, and police.

Dauphin County Commissioner George Hartwick, III says each county needs to have resources for the children. “There needs to be a dedicated revenue source to find child advocacy centers throughout PA.”

Hartwick says that funding should come from outside of fundraisers.

There is a bill in the house now, that if its passed, it would make those charged with crimes against children pay a fine and that money would go to child advocacy centers.

Reported by: Kyle Rogers
Contributor: Rachel Snody

A hefty share of the NCAA’s $60 million fine against Penn State over the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal should be to pumped into child advocacy centers to help abuse victims, Dauphin County Commissioner George Hartwick III said Thursday.

“There could be no better utilization of those resources,” Hartwick said.

He made that proposal during a program at the Pennsylvania State Police Academy in Derry Township to tout the ChildFirst program.

That program, now a year old in the Keystone State, aims to unite the efforts of police, prosecutors and child welfare advocates to increase the effectiveness of child sexual abuse prosecutions while curbing the damage to the victims.

A main tenet of ChildFirst, which operates in 19 states, is to focus on the needs of the child.

For example, it advocates limiting interviews of abused children to specially-trained interviewers so the youngsters don’t have to repeat their accounts of molestation over and over and there is a reduced risk of their testimony being tainted by intended or inadvertent adult suggestions.

While the Sandusky case and the prosecutions of molestation claims against Catholic Church officials in Philadelphia have drawn public attention of late, many more abuse cases go through the courts unnoticed, State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan said.

The state police handled about 1,500 child sexual abuse cases in the past year, he said.

“How many of these have you heard of? Hardly any,” Noonan said.

“Society wants too look the other way,” he said. “It can’t believe these kinds of things are taking place.”

Thursday’s press conference coincided with a weeklong ChildFirst training program at the academy, one of nine such sessions being held at state police facilities across Pennsylvania this year.

Carlisle attorney Jason Kutulakis, a member of the Governor’s Task Force on Child Abuse, is one of the instructors.

ChildFirst stresses that young abuse victims be questioned by trained interviewers, not well-meaning amateurs, and to have their statements memorialized on a recording, Kutulakis said.

In the past, he said, it was not uncommon for a child to undergo a dozen interviews after reporting abuse. “That’s not child-centered. That’s not child-focused,” said Kutulakis, who is past president of the state Children and Youth Solicitors Association.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” said Adams County District Attorney Shawn Wagner, president of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association. “In my experience, the system can exacerbate what the child has gone through.”
“In a child sexual abuse case, the first response is the most important one.” – Adams County District Attorney Shawn Wagner

That’s why the cooperative, interagency premise of ChildFirst is vital in rescuing child abuse victims and prosecuting their predators, he said.

“The most important approach we can have in child abuse cases is a collaborative one,” he said. “We must all work together. In a child sexual abuse case, the first response is the most important one.”

Concentrating on that first, pure interview with the victim and minimizing the legal system’s trauma not only gives the child a better chance at recovery, but provides stronger evidence against the molesters, Wagner said.

That approach works, Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico agreed.

“We’re seeing fewer trials in these cases and more guilty pleas, so the children don’t have to go through a trial,” Marsico said.

Child advocacy centers are the best settings for interviewing and helping molested children, he, Wagner, Kutulakis and Hartwick said.

They called for a vast expansion of those centers in the state. Only about one-third of the state’s 67 counties have access to such centers, which are hubs for child-abuse interviews and for services to aid molestation victims.

All counties in the midstate have access to such centers. Adams, York and Lancaster counties have their own centers and the Harrisburg-based Children’s Resource Center operated by PinnacleHealth System serves Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry and Lebanon counties.

Those centers find their funding from a variety of not always stable sources, and Hartwick said Pinnacle actually loses money on its center. He said a government funding stream should be dedicated to support the operations.

“There is no excuse for short-changing children,” he said.

Others have the same idea. Two bills to finance aid for child abuse victims have passed the state House and are bound for the Senate.

One calls for shifting $400,000 left over from the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program to the child advocacy centers. The other proposes to create a fund by imposing a new $15 fee on everyone who pleads guilty to any crime.

Money aside, there should be only one overriding aim, Kutulakis said.

“We as a community must protect our most precious resource,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the natural gas here in Pennsylvania. It’s the children of the commonwealth.”

By Matt Miller | mmiller@pennlive.com

Lawmakers are looking to continue protecting kids in Pennsylvania.

House Judiciary Committee’s Chairman Ron Marsico (R-Dauphin) and House Children and Youth Committee’s Chairwoman Kathy Watson (R-Bucks) hosted a joint hearing to obtain testimony from members of the Child Protection Task Force.

The task force presented its report to the committees and answered questions from the members in attendance.

The two committees hope to gather information and examine the recommendations in order to develop legislation pertaining to the findings of the task force.

One of the important aspects of the task force is a forensic interviewer who is trained to ask developmentally appropriate questions to the child.

The forensic interviewer interviews the child and that child’s interview is preserved by video if the need were to arise to go to court. With this method, the child would not have to be subjected to several interviews with multiple professionals; it’s a one stop shop process.

by Amanda McCall – Fox43

Philip J. McConnaughay, now bound for China, has carved out an impressive list of achievements as dean of Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law.

But around the historic home of the once-independent school, McConnaughay’s departure is being greeted with as much relief as sadness, and a chance to reset a sometimes tense partnership with Penn State.

McConnaughay said Thursday that he is leaving, effective Aug. 1, to become dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law, based in Shenzhen.

There he will lead a school that seeks to fill a growing need for attorneys in China and offers graduate programs aimed at helping foreign attorneys do business there.

His 11-year tenure at Dickinson was touted by Penn State leaders Thursday as a time of growth for the law school as a whole, with the addition of state-of-the art facilities in Carlisle and State College, advanced technology to link them, and steady improvement in the quality and diversity of the student body.

Penn State President Rodney Erickson called McConnaughay an innovator who “can take great pride in all that has been accomplished under his watch.”

The positives are offset in Carlisle and with many Dickinson alumni by strongly held views that McConnaughay on multiple occasions bent university commitments to stay in Carlisle:

In 2003 it was McConnaughay who proposed moving the Carlisle-based law school to State College, just six years after Spanier and other university leaders had said the law school would remain in Carlisle “in perpetuity.” The dean raised the idea after seeing a capital campaign fall short of its targets and the school sliding in academic rankings. That proposal triggered a lengthy battle with alumni and the Rendell Administration that resulted in the current dual campus approach.

Last year, McConnaughay reopened the old wounds by proposing — as part of a response to declining law school applications nationally — to shrink first-year law classes and consolidate them at State College. The proposal was seen in some quarters as a new death knell for the Carlisle campus, already the smaller of the two law campuses.

Again, this came just four years after the university’s top leaders had signed contracts committing it to operate a three-year law program in Carlisle through at least 2020.

After receiving substantial pushback last fall, McConnaughay embarked on a new plan to seek separate accreditations for the Carlisle and State College law campuses, which would then continue to operate independently of each other.

The dean’s positions were perfectly legitimate when seen through the filter of a forward-looking administrator seeking the best for his school.

But Dickinson had a past, and Penn State — which had no law school prior to its original 1997 merger with the Carlisle school — had made promises.

As a result, some here could never shake the belief that McConnaughay pursued a State College-first mentality in running the law school from programming to student recruitment to hiring new faculty.

“There has been a trust issue with the dean, and it had to do with Penn State’s willingness to live up to its agreements,” said Chris Gulotta, a alum who helped structure agreements that allowed $25 million in state aid to flow to renovations at Carlisle as the former executive director of the Cumberland County Redevelopment Authority.

“I think this [change] will be very helpful because we will have a fresh perspective from Penn State’s vantage point… and maybe some different approaches for helping the Carlisle campus achieve parity with the University Park campus,” Gulotta said.

“It’s a great law school whether you have Dean McConnaughay in there or not,” said Carlisle attorney Jason Kutalakis, a Dickinson alum and frequent McConnaughay critic.

“Hopefully, some of the tension and animosity we have experienced in the past 10 years will leave with his departure.”

Plan to sever unified law school into two institutions stays on course, Penn State officials say.

Erickson told Penn Live today that Penn State’s decision to pursue separate accreditations for each campus from the American Bar Association stays in place for now, even though the split may not be fully executed until 2014.

But others sense the transition period creates a new period of fluidity.

For example, members of the Dickinson Law Association, the alumni group that holds veto power over some aspects of the law school’s operations through 2015 as per the dual campus agreement, are known to be lobbying quietly for the preservation of a single Dickinson Law School.

“It’s my hope that his [McConnaughay’s] successor will continue with the unified, two-campus program as it is,” said DLA member and attorney Hubert X. Gilroy, arguing that Dickinson can grow stronger simply with better marketing of the respective campuses’ strengths.

McConnaughay, reached by phone while traveling Thursday, said he prepares for his next assignment with no regrets about the changes he helped spur.

Controversy in Carlisle, he added, was a necessary by-product of changing the mindset at Dickinson to allow the merger with Penn State to work.

He reiterated that Dickinson School of Law was losing ground in the battle for quality students and financial resources to raise its game at the time Penn State initiated merger talks.

“I think the law school would have continued to struggle [without establishing separate campuses],” McConnaughay said. “The merger wouldn’t have made sense without fully embracing the possibility it provided in integrating with one of the world’s great research universities.”

BY CHARLES THOMPSON AND ERIC VERONIKIS, PennLive.com