(Radio Iowa) – A former Webster County teacher is pleading guilty to a charge of sexual exploitation by a school employee, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. Brandon Louis was the choir director at Southeast Valley High School in Gowrie. Louis admits in a plea agreement that he had exchanged text messages with a student that were sexual in nature. Haley Studyvin, a graduate of Southeast Valley, says the messages Louis sent her began arriving later and later at night.

“The texts started as endearing like, ‘You’re one of my favorites, you know. You’re going to do great things,'” she says. “He’d always throw in a lot of, ‘I’m not supposed to be doing this. I could get fired for doing this,’ and then it progressed into where, by the end of my senior year, he was trying to get me to leave my house in the middle of the night and come over to his apartment and sleep with him.” Studyvin says her eyes have been opened to how often this sort of abuse happens, but she says it took a while before she understood what was happening to her.

“I needed to realize that what he was doing was not because he cared about me,” Studyvin says. “What he was doing was manipulating me and hurting me and putting me in a position that nobody should ever have to be in because it’s not healthy and it’s not safe and you’ll never come out of it feeling good about yourself.” Studyvin says her message to others going through similar situations is that they will be able to heal.

Two years ago, Studyvin told the Southeast Valley school board she and more than 20 other students who had been victimized by the choir director. Louis resigned in October of 2020 and he was arrested in November of last year after a year-long investigation. He’s scheduled to be sentenced December 19th.