King County Superior Court Judge Mary Roberts this week set Dec. 6 as the date to begin the trial of a former Auburn Adventist Academy teacher charged with having sex with one of his female teenage students.

Prosecutors in February charged Scott Spies, 49, with one count of third-degree rape of a child and two counts of first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor.

Spies, who had taught at the school since 2009, pleaded innocent March 3. 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.

The omnibus or pre-trial hearing will be Nov. 19 at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. A courtroom or judge has not yet been assigned to the trial. Spies is free on $150,000 bail.

According to an Auburn Police Detective’s statement filed with charging papers, other students first told Linda Kay Sanborn, the Dean of Women Students, about the relationship, but the girl told Sanborn there was no such relationship.

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

Students then revealed more details to Sanborn, from which she determined that the sexual encounters had occurred at Spies’ 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 he was arrested.

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 the last had occurred on Feb. 14.

Spies graduated from the Auburn Adventist Academy in 1979 and 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.