Pee-pee perv sentenced

CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA

- A federal judge yesterday sentenced a former Iowa elementary-school principal to 30 years in prison and fined him $25,000 for his massive collection of Internet child pornography and for secretly videotaping dozens of young boys while they were using the bathroom, and called his actions among the worst crimes against children she'd seen.

U.S. District Judge Linda Reade said that former Sageville Elementary School principal Robert Burke was a danger to the community.

Reade said that he had one of the biggest collections of child pornography she'd ever heard of - 32,000 images and 12,000 videos, mostly of young boys performing sex acts. And she recounted how Burke, 43, had hidden a video camera near a bathroom sink or on his own belt 12 times between January and June to capture images of the genitals of at least 59 students between ages of 5 and 11.

The mother of two victims said that she taught for five years under Burke, and accused him of pushing out veteran teachers so that he could have more control over school operations.

Investigators arrested Burke at his Dubuque home in June, after an FBI agent in Washington linked his computer to child pornography on the Internet.

Burke, a former Catholic-school principal who had been at Sageville since 2004, denied that he had ever sexually abused students, and a federal investigation did not uncover any evidence to the contrary. But Reade noted that Burke once put a camera down a student's swimming trunks.