Last year, I reported on a case involving the Montessori School of Raleigh and a teacher at the school, Nicholas Conlon Smith.

Smith has been charged with 33 sex-related felonies involving minors and children.

A complaint has been filed against the school by Smith’s victims for failing to protect them and refusing to act on allegations reported about Smith.

First a recap of the case against Nicholas Smith.

Nicholas Conlon Smith

Nicholas Conlon Smith, 36, was arrested on November 7th, 2017 and originally charged with 16 felony counts of statutory rape with a 14-year-old girl and 4 counts of felony sex offense with a student.

Those charges stemmed from alleged incidents that occurred between August 2011 and June 2012. Wake County Assistant District Attorney Christy Joyce told the court that a second victim has been identified and more charges were likely to come – and they did.

The additional charges bring Smith’s total to 33 sexually related felony counts.

Additional child exploitation charges were added after sexually explicit images of female students were found on Smith’s home computer. The arrest warrant served on Smith states that he is accused of ‘encouraging and coercing’ a young girl to take nude pictures of herself and then send the images to him.

According to law enforcement, the images were taken in 2011 and in 2012. The female students in question were between the ages of 14 and 15 at the time and were partially nude in the images.

A search for Smith in the Wake County mugshot database pulled up three arrests, one of which was in Durham in 2015 and has not been included in local reporting that I’ve seen so far.

The Complaint Filed Against The School

Indyweek reported on the complaint being filed.

In a lawsuit filed in Wake County Superior Court in January that has so far gone unreported, the parents of two sisters—identified in court documents as Jane Doe I and Jane Doe II—who were allegedly sexually assaulted by a teacher at the Montessori School of Raleigh have accused the school and its leader, Nancy Errichetti, of failing to protect the girls from their abuser and responding their parents’ discovery of the abuse by at first denying it and and then refusing “to take any action with respect to their complaint.”

This afternoon, a spokeswoman for the school’s Board of Trustees told the INDY it is “standing behind [Errichetti] one hundred percent.”

In the multi-part series I wrote in 2017, The Quiet Epidemic, one of the topics touched on was how schools try to broom cases like these.

The school system I looked at was more interested in covering up both the accusations and the teachers related to them than they were in investigating the situation to protect the children that might be in harm’s way. This complaint seems to allege something along similar lines.

The Complaint against the school is here and the Answer/Affirmative Defense documents are here.