Former Lower Merion teacher pleads guilty to posing as a teenager online to solicit nudes from students

A former Harriton High School teacher admitted Monday he’d spent years posing as a teenager online to solicit sexually explicit images from underage girls — including at least one of the school’s students.

Jeremy Schobel — who taught English at the school from 2021 until he was fired after his arrest last year — told a federal judge he’d communicated with hundreds of teenagers through fake social media profiles he created for the purpose of persuading them to send him nude videos and photos.

He pleaded guilty to counts including receiving and manufacturing child pornography tied to six victims and faces a minimum prison term of 15 years at a sentencing hearing scheduled for June.

His lawyer, Joseph D’Andrea, described Schobel, 32, of Philadelphia as remorseful and eager to make amends for his crimes. However, the lawyer maintained after Monday’s hearing that his client did not know one of his victims was a Harriton student at the time he was urging her to send him explicit photos — an account later disputed by prosecutors.

Though Schobel was not the girl’s teacher, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella said, she was friends with several students in his class.

Schobel first came to the attention of authorities in late 2022, when the French social media site Yubo flagged suspicious activity on two linked accounts it believed were being used to groom teenage girls online.

The screen names — “jillmoreno131″ and “sophiavan423″ — purported to be those of a 17-year-old girl, but investigators later linked both to Schobel.

A subsequent review of activity on the accounts and Snapchat profiles using the same screen names uncovered contact with girls dating back years, prosecutors said.

Some of that activity was tracked back to Harriton High School’s IP address, suggesting that Schobel was using the accounts while on the school’s campus and during working hours to communicate with potential victims.

Though Schobel denied targeting any of his students when FBI agents first confronted him with their findings, investigators later discovered images and videos from the Harriton student linked to his accounts..

She later told investigators she only sent them because she thought the person she was communicating with was a fellow teenage girl she’d befriended on the internet, Rotella said.

Prosecutors said agents also uncovered communications between Schobel and another student from the school where he taught before Harriton — the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, where he worked as an English teacher and girls’ softball coach until 2021. But D’Andrea, the defense lawyer, maintained there was no evidence that Schobel persuaded that student to send any illicit images.

Schobel has remained in federal custody since agents arrested him at his home in June.

On Monday, he sat quietly at the defense table, eyes downcast, as Rotella detailed his litany of crimes in court.

“Did you do everything the government says you did?” U.S. District Judge John F. Murphy asked him.

Schobel replied softly: “Yes, your honor, I did.”

Lower Merion School District officials declined to comment after his guilty plea Monday, except to say the school system had suspended Schobel as soon as it was informed of the investigation last summer. Its school board voted to fire him in September.

A spokesperson for the school system previously described Schobel’s crimes as an “egregious violation of Lower Merion School district policy” and a “horrifying violation of the trust of our students and families.”