Virginia teaching assistant charged with sex crimes, second employee arrested at the school this academic year

A teaching assistant in Virginia was arrested after a student caught him masturbating at his desk, marking the second staff member at the Fairfax County high school to face charges for sex crimes this academic term.

David Scalea, 40, was in a classroom at Langley High School on Oct. 11 when he allegedly began to inappropriately touch himself behind the desk. A student caught him in the act and reported it to the school administrator, who also let the resource officer know.

Scalea was quickly arrested and charged with obscene sexual display and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, which are both misdemeanors.

Fairfax County Public Schools suspended Scalea without pay. He had been a teaching assistant with FCPS since 2020.

With school just barely three months underway, Langley High School has now seen two employees face charges for different sexual acts concerning minors.

In August, near the very beginning of the academic term, a teacher who also served as the school’s football coach was arrested on five counts of sexual solicitation with a minor.

Police caught the coach, 48-year-old David Clay Murray, communicating with minors through the cell phone messaging app Telegram when he unknowingly started chatting with a cop posing as a teenage girl. Murray allegedly tried to solicit different sex acts multiple times while messaging.

“If you act bratty, Santa might get rough,” Murray wrote in one message, according to the charging documents.

“Santa would go nuts with you on his lap.” 

Murray’s attorney said that his client thought he was communicating with an adult who claimed to be “role-playing” as a teenage girl.

The school principal sent a letter home to parents trying to affirm their collective dedication to making the school safe and secure, which seemed to help inspire confidence for some parents.

“I can imagine it’s got to be hard for Langley to be handling this. We love Langley so much, we love the school, but we’ve got to make sure our kids are protected and there’s got to be something that should be addressed,” Lisa Durant, the mother of a Langley student, told Fox5 DC. 

Fairfax County Schools assured that they do stringent background checks as part of their hiring process. The school district had announced last year that it would implement new measures for ongoing background checks for all employees.