A Delta Secondary teacher has been permanently stripped of his teaching privileges after admitting to viewing teen porn in school.
Robin James Wait, who was fired from the Delta school district in December 2013, admitted to the allegation and agreed never to try to teach again, according to a consent resolution agreement released this week by the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation.
He entered the agreement last December.
The English teacher was accused of using a district issued computer between 2006 and 2011 to write, store and access several pornographic stories, including one involving a male teacher having sex in the classroom with a female student and another of a man having sex with a teenage female in a girl’s change room. He also stored a couple of images of a teenage girl, one of the girl partially dressed and the other naked, as well as 19 other porn images in a subfolder titled “student teaching.”
He also accessed porn images and videos on the Internet, engaged in on-line chat of a sexually explicit nature and also accessed social media websites primarily targeted to and used by teenage girls.
The computer records showed the materials were often accessed during school hours and when he should have been teaching to students.
In a separate incident, in December 2013, he touched the upper back and thigh of a woman on an escalator in a public place. A month earlier, he touched the buttocks of a female minor in a public place and plead guilty in provincial court a few months later to that act, receiving a 12-month conditional discharge.
It’s not the first time Wait got in trouble with the law.
In November 2011, officers were called to DSS after a student alleged a teacher had sexually assaulted her. Wait was identified by the girl and a friend through photos in a school yearbook. Wait was arrested at his home in the presence of his wife and two young children. A few days later, a second student made similar allegations and Wait was then charged with two counts of sexual assault and two counts of sexual interference. After the arrest and charges, Wait was suspended without pay by the district. He had not worked, nor been permitted to work, in the district since then.
In the summer of 2012, Crown counsel elected to stay the charges against Wait, who denied the allegations. In early 2013 he launched a lawsuit against several police officers and the Corporation of Delta over the handling of the investigation of the alleged incidents.
Meantime, in an unrelated story, another Delta teacher has been stripped of his licence for professional misconduct involving two high school students. James Hugh Tracey took a leave of absence from the Delta school district in 2005/06 to teach in another province. It’s there where he reportedly allowed a number of students to “hang out” at his house, including kids clearly intoxicated. During this time, he formed an “inappropriately close” relationship with two female teen students. In September 2011, he self-reported to the B.C. College of Teachers that he had been charged with two counts of sexual exploitation in relation to the out of the province incidents. He was then suspended by the district with pay. Although those charges were stayed in April 2013, he did not work for the district again.
He was fired in late 2014 due to his certificate of qualification being cancelled in November 2012 for non-payment of fees.
In June 2016, he entered a consent resolution agreement for professional misconduct due to what happened out of province. He will not be eligible to apply for a teaching certificate for 10 years.
