Former SAR admin is sentenced to 15 years

A former SAR Academy associate principal will spend the next 15 years behind bars after pleading guilty last April to tricking students into sending him sexually explicit photos.

Jonathan Skolnick, 40, spent years convincing more than 100 boys on various email and social media accounts he was a teenaged girl, according to federal prosecutors, so he could solicit nude pictures of them.

Skolnick had been working at SAR for a little more than a year when he was arrested in September 2019.

“This lengthy prison sentence holds Skolnick accountable for his horrific crimes and the extraordinary harm and trauma he caused to many minor victims and their families,” U.S. District Attorney Damian Williams said, in a release.

Skolnick was first arrested after he enticed a 14-year-old boy to send him photos through email and texts from a spoofed phone number. Posing as a female, Skolnick first began chatting with the boy platonically, then sexually — even to the point of sending over photos of naked females to further convince him.

When the boy stopped communicating with these fake accounts, Skolnick threatened he would share the boy’s nudes publicly unless the teen kept talking to him.

The FBI tracked those fake accounts, leading agents to Skolnick’s home, where he was arrested. SAR fired him soon after.

“It is shocking to know that someone who we have trusted with our children has been accused of harming them,” principal Binyamin Krauss wrote to parents after the 2019 arrest. “Despite the practices in place to protect our children, we are not immune to breaches such as the one that seems to have taken place at SAR.”

In addition to his prison term, Skolnick was also sentenced to five years of supervised release.