Ex-teacher Sentenced in Sprague Sexting Case

By John Barry
Norwich Bulletin
June 25, 2013

http://www.norwichbulletin.com/news/x624123577/Ex-teacher-sentenced-in-Sprague-sexting-case#axzz2XQPqnyv6

Former teacher Robert S. Pfeiffer accepted a plea deal that will allow him to avoid prison.

A former teacher at a Sprague school accused of sending inappropriate texts to an underage student has been sentenced to probation.

According to the terms of a plea bargain agreed to in April, Robert Pfeiffer, 31, of Hebron, received a five-year suspended sentence and five years’ probation.

Pfeiffer will not be able to teach or coach during the five years of his probation. In addition, he is expected to have to submit to sexual offender status, in which he will be banned from unsupervised contact with minors. The terms of the deal don’t require him to register as a sex offender.

The plea bargain was made on the eve of Pfeiffer’s trial in New London Superior Court in order to spare the girl to whom he sent the messages the ordeal of testifying, said attorney Bernard Steadman, who represents her interests in court.

Pfeiffer is accused of sending the messages seeking a sexual relationship in the 2009-10 school year to a then-14-year-old freshman at the Academy of the Holy Family, a parochial school in Sprague.

“You will leave here as a convicted felon,” Judge Susan Handy, who sentenced Pfeiffer, told him. “You were a teacher. You were not to perpetrate, but to protect.”