King County Prosecutors on Thursday charged a former teacher at Auburn Adventist Academy with one count of third-degree rape of a child and two counts of first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor for allegedly having sex with a teenage female student.

Scott Spies, 49, who had taught at the school since 2009, will be arraigned at 9 a.m. March 3 in courtroom GA at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. If convicted on all three counts, he could be looking at five years in prison, Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor’s Office, told The Auburn Reporter on Monday.

Spies was released from jail Saturday after posting $150,000 bail.

School officials said they fired Spies immediately after he allegedly admitted to having sex with the student. Auburn Police later arrested him at his apartment and booked him into the Regional Justice Center in Kent.

Auburn Adventist Academy Principal Dr. Marvin Mitchell said Monday that the school is helping the girl and providing counselors for other students.

“We’re looking on this as a tragedy, and we are doing all we can to work with the victim,” Mitchell said. “We notified the victim’s family and the police of course, and we are trying to make sure that the rest of the students are protected and that we carry on with school. Our main job is to help kids.”

According to an Auburn Police Detective’s statement filed with charging papers, Linda Kay Sanborn, the Dean of Women Students, first learned about the relationship last Tuesday from other students. When she brought the girl into her office to question her, the girl denied having sex with Spies.

Sanborn later brought Spies into her office and he, too, denied having sex with the girl.

Students then revealed more details to Sanborn, from which she determined that the sexual encounters had occurred at his Auburn apartment. Sanborn then brought the girl back into her office, at which time, according to the detective’s statement, she admitted to having sex with Spies. She said they first had sex when she was 15.

According to the statement, Sanborn again questioned Spies, at which time he allegedly admitted to the sexual encounters. He was immediately fired, barred from campus and forbidden from any further involvement with students.

According to the detective’s statement, Spies admitted to police during an interview at his apartment that he had had sex with the student. Asked how old she then was, he allegedly responded, “15 for one week, then she turned 16,” at which point police arrested him.

According to the detective’s statement, the girl later told Auburn police that she first met Spies in February of 2009. She told police that he became her mentor, helped her with her problems and spent time talking with her. According to the statement, she told police that by the end of the school year, she and Spies knew that they liked each other, and that lead to a relationship she described as a “commitment.”

According to the statement, the girl said that she went home to Thailand during summer break, but that she and Spies communicated all summer long via e-mail. She said they first had sex in August at his home just before school started. She told police they had sex at his apartment but also twice in his school office.

According to the statement, she told police they both acknowledged to each other that what they were doing was wrong but continued anyway. She estimated that they had 15 sexual encounters, and that last had occurred on Feb. 14.

According to KOMO News, even before Spies’ arrest some neighbors admitted they were puzzled by “weird” things they had seen happening at his apartment, jarring events given his image as a nice, Christian guy. One of Spies’ neighbors told KOMO News that he had seen the teacher bring high school-age girls to his apartment several times starting about a year ago.

Spies, who graduated from the Auburn Adventist Academy in 1979, has a masters of arts in teaching. Before teaching at the Academy, he taught eighth grade at nearby Buena Vista Elementary School from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2008. Buena Vista is a Seventh Day Adventist school.

Spies was profiled in the May 11, 2005 edition of the Auburn Reporter for building a facsimile of the Transcontinental Railroad in his classroom as a teaching aid for his students.