Emily Lehneis appears in a booking photo from May 2023. (Southern York Regional Police Department)
A now-former high school special education teacher and soccer coach, currently pregnant with her third child, will spend at least a year behind bars because she engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a high school student, a judge in Pennsylvania ruled this week.
Emily Lehneis, 30, was originally charged with solicitation to production of child pornography, unlawful contact with a minor, obscenity, institutional sexual assault, and corruption of minors, according to the Southern York Regional Police Department.
In September, as part of a plea agreement, she admitted to one felony count of school – intercourse/sexual contact with student and one misdemeanor count of corruption of minors. The state dismissed the remaining charges. On Dec. 26, she was sentenced to between one and two years in prison by York County Judge Kathleen J. Prendergast.
“She manipulated me and had total control. She used her marriage, family and career to keep me from saying anything,” the victim said in an impact statement read aloud by York County Chief Deputy District Attorney Taylor Katherman during the sentencing hearing, according to a courtroom report by the York Dispatch.
“I’m trying to get by each day with breathing techniques and trying not to cry,” the teenage girl’s statement continued.
The defendant directly addressed the victim as well — in a statement that essayed a certain level of contrition for the relationship.
“I want … her family to know how sorry I am for what I did,” Lehneis said, according to the paper. “I have no excuse for what I did, and I cannot understand how I let myself do what I did.”
The charges were the result of a six month investigation into the illicit relationship, police say. Lehneis was arrested on May 9.
According to the Daily Voice, the woman’s resignation from the Southern York County School District came earlier: on Jan. 27. Her perhaps final departure from the world of education came a bit later: when she was suspended from coaching for the nearby South Western School District and simultaneously had her teaching license suspended on Aug. 25 by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
In 2022, well before those repercussions, Lehneis met her teenage girl victim, who is not being identified. The girl has been described in local media as a soccer player who was 16 or 17 years old. At the start of the new school year, the relationship developed. Ultimately, Lehneis kissed the girl in a classroom and the two exchanged sexually explicit text messages and images via their phones and on social media, police said. The defendant privately tutored the girl in soccer.
Lehneis’s defense attorney reportedly argued for leniency and a county prison sentence in light of his client’s pregnancy. She is due in March. The judge rejected that line of argument.
The girl’s mother also addressed the court, saying that her daughter was bullied after the relationship — and that the bullying continues.
According to a criminal complaint obtained by York-based Fox affiliate WPMT, the teacher once put a name tag on an area of the student’s body near her private parts in a “flirtatious way.”
“[S]he never thought her first kiss would be from a teacher,” the complaint says.
Around the time when the then-teacher turned 30 years old in October, she allegedly asked the teenage student to be her “secret girlfriend,” police alleged. The relationship went on for at least two weeks. Eventually, the girl told Lehneis what they were doing was wrong.
“Anything that happens to the defendant is based on the behavior she brought on herself, and is no way based on anything that the victim did or did not do,” Prendergast said during sentencing, according to the Dispatch.
Lehneis was also sentenced to five years of probation and will have to register as a Tier II sex offender. She will not be allowed to have contact with children other than her own — and until a family court or parole board issues a decision, those visits must be supervised.
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