A former athletic trainer who had been working for a third-party contractor at Pine Richland Middle School and High School is accused of taking pictures of students in various states of undress at the school.
34-year-old Samuel Fischer worked with the district between 2014 and 2019.
State Police Spokesman Rocco Gagliardi says they began their investigation in Chester County where he was a student teacher at the Owen Roberts School District.
“Then those investigators started looking and saying ‘some of these are completely separate’, so we started to do some digging and see some previous history of employment and other things like that and it looked like he was a trainer at Pine-Richland School District.”
Gagliardi says they realized not all of the photos were taken in Chester County.
“They were able to take the smallest bit of a corner of a picture and kind of matchup and say ‘yeah, that’s Pine-Richland’s locker room in 2015’,” said Gagliardi.
An email has gone out to parents to inform them of the situation.
The District says the third-party contractor managed the clearance requirements for Fischer.
The students believed to have been photographed have been notified by the State Police.
Police went through yearbooks to identify the students.
All of the charges against Fischer are being adjudicated in Chester County, where his preliminary hearing is scheduled for January 23.