Former charter school director pleads guilty to producing child sex abuse materials
Jun 8, 2026, 4:40 PM | Updated: 4:47 pm
A former Utah charter school director has entered a guilty plea to three federal charges after admitting he created a chat group for parents to share images abusing their children. (Joe Raedle, Getty Images)
(Joe Raedle, Getty Images)
SALT LAKE CITY — A former Utah charter school director has entered a guilty plea to three federal charges after admitting he created a chat group for parents to share images abusing their children.
Jared Buckley from West Point, 41, was the lead director at Leadership Learning Academy in Layton and Ogden for seven years until April 2025, when he was taken into federal custody for having “well over” 10,000 inappropriate images and videos of kids.
According to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah, FBI agents started investigating in October 2024 after they got wind of a user representing that “he had original child sexual abuse material that he could produce and distribute to others for a price.” Through the investigation, FBI agents were able to connect that user to a telephone number that was associated to Buckley.
On Wednesday, Buckley entered a guilty plea to producing, distributing, and possessing child sex abuse materials. In his plea, he admitted that he created a group on an end-to-end encrypted chat application, specifically for parents to share content involving their own daughters under the age of 10.
“The express purpose of the group was for users from around the world to engage in the sexual abuse of their own children and share that with users of the group,” Buckley wrote in his plea. “For the group, I created flyers which stated: ‘This group is for parents who have little girls ages 0-9 only.’ I required three steps of verification to join the group.”
He confessed that he encouraged the users in that group to create types of abusive content he wanted to see. There was no mention of any in-person crimes related to children at the schools where he worked.
As part of the plea, he agreed to a stipulated sentence of 30 years in prison, followed by supervised release. He waived his right to seek early termination of his supervised release until he has served at least 20 years. He will also be forced to register as a sex offender and pay his victims restitution.
His sentence will run concurrently with any sentence imposed during the state case against him. A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for June 17.
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