A teacher at a Philly private school is accused of helping solicit nude videos from his students

A popular teacher at the private Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, already facing child-porn charges, now stands accused of targeting his middle and high school students by conspiring with others online to trick them into sending nude photos and videos.

Federal prosecutors say Andrew Wolf — who was charged in October with buying explicit videos of a 13-year-old boy with a $100 PlayStation gift card — also kept detailed spreadsheets of his students and their social media accounts that he shared with a New York man he met online.

Together, the two allegedly targeted the children, and succeeded in at least one case, in persuading them to send lewd videos of themselves by posing as a teenage girl on services like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.

Those details emerged in a little-noticed government court filing last week charging Wolf’s alleged coconspirator — Kray Strange, 19, of Carthage, N.Y. — in a case that could send both men to prison for a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

“This is difficult and disturbing news,” said Steve Druggan, SCH’s head of school, in a letter issued to parents and teachers acknowledging that some of the school’s students had been victims. He added: “Throughout the investigation, we have assisted law enforcement. … The FBI has been in direct contact with the families of those SCH students who are pertinent to the investigation.”

The news has only further roiled the Northwest Philadelphia K-12 campus, where annual tuition ranges from $32,000 to $43,000.

For some parents, it brought to mind previous scandals, including SCH’s delay in notifying alumni after one of its former teachers, Frank “Sandy” Thomson IV, who worked at the school from 1972 to 1998, pleaded guilty to molesting a teenage boy in 2017.

Wolf, a math teacher who received an award for teaching excellence in 2018, had not had a single complaint of inappropriate conduct before his arrest last year, school officials said at the time.

In October, Druggan had assured parents that, as far as they knew, none of the hundreds of images and videos of child pornography FBI agents had found on Wolf’s electronic devices were of students at the school.

When they learned more from federal authorities, they immediately revised those statements and notified the SCH community last week, Druggan said in his letter.

So far, he said, the number of students targeted by Wolf appears to have been “limited.”

Prosecutors say Wolf had expressed a sexual interest in his students — who ranged in age from 13 to 15 — in online conversations with several other men interested in child pornography, including one who went by the screen name “Mr. Pickles” and also claimed to be a teacher.

But it was the relationship Wolf struck up with Strange — who first contacted him in May 2020 after becoming a fan of the teacher’s writing on an erotic fiction website — that gave Wolf the opportunity to act on his impulses, government court filings allege.

According to the documents, rife with excerpts of their online conversations, Strange, a college student, bragged about his ability to catfish younger boys online with social media profiles he had created posing as a teenage girl named Alex. He allegedly shared explicit videos of at least 25 minors he had manipulated into sending him explicit photos.

“Do you have any boys you want me to bait?” he asked Wolf two months into their relationship. “Any boy. I’d even try [your] nephews if you got info for it.”

Within weeks, Wolf agreed and was compiling info on his students’ social media activity for Strange, according to the complaint.

“Decided to make a Google Doc to help organize baiting my students,” he wrote Strange that month.

Strange allegedly sent Wolf screenshots of the chats he had with the students, detailing his efforts to persuade them to send him nude videos.

“Come on,” Wolf commented while reading Strange’s chat with one student. “Stop being such a prude.”

That boy, a 14-year-old in one of Wolf’s classes, eventually relented, prosecutors said. When contacted by FBI agents after Wolf’s arrest last year, the teen said he believed he was communicating on Snapchat with a teenage girl named Alex.

Wolf’s attorneys, Arthur Donato Jr. and Peter C. Bowers, declined to comment Wednesday. He has remained in custody at the Federal Detention Center in Center City since his arrest last fall at the Roxborough home where he lived alone with his 6-month-old child.

It was not clear from court filings whether Strange, who was arrested last week in New York, had retained an attorney.

With roughly 1,000 students, SCH bills itself as the city’s largest independent school.

School officials said they will continue to provide support for students who may have been victims. Its board, Druggan said in his letter, has organized an external review board to audit the school’s human resources, security, and technology practices.

“We are steadfast in our commitment to the safety and well-being of our students and our community,” he wrote. “We will do everything we can to help protect those in our community.”