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High School Teacher arrested for alleged child sex abuse of student

Stephen E. Raught, a teacher at Owen J. Roberts High School in Chester County has been charged with sexually assaulting a female student in the school. School administrators allegedly have known about his prior record of inappropriate behavior with students and did not take action.

There is an ongoing investigation into how the school board mishandled the report of the teacher’s inappropriate behavior with students in the past.

As a result of this teacher’s arrest, the school has received a number of complaints from other students and reports of prior disclosures of possible abuse from students that may not have been reported.

The high school history teacher, Stephen E. Raught, was an advisor on the Owen J. Roberts School Board and was arrested earlier this month. He was the longtime advisor to the student government at the high school, as well as president of the Roberts Education Association teachers union.

A 17-year-old female student told police that she had stopped by the school to pick up a textbook after the district went on shutdown because of the coronavirus pandemic and Raught, 53, took her to his classroom and engaged in oral sex with her.

After news of Raught’s arrest spread through the community, a number of former students who had served on the school’s student government over the years wrote a letter to the school board addressing that they ignored earlier warnings and complaints about Raught’s behavior and insisted that there be immediate and definitive steps to better protect students.

The former students wrote in the letter that Raughts arrest  “have many of us thinking about whether this could have been prevented. Was a pattern of misbehavior ignored? Should we have spoken up? The truth is that students did speak up,” the letter stated. “This teacher’s inappropriate actions were reported and dismissed time and again. In one instance, a student said, “I reported it to admin and was told ‘you took that the wrong way.'”

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