A former San Antonio educator was indicted on sex crime charges involving multiple female students.
Jesse Ybarra Orta, 34, was charged with two counts of improper relationship between educator and student and one count of possession of child pornography.
KSAT reported that the improper relationship charges involve sexual contact with two different students between November 2023 and March 2024, while the third charge alleges Orta possessed child sexual abuse material in September 2024.
The San Antonio Police Department arrested Orta in October 2024.
At the time, Orta worked at Somerset Academy Collegiate, a public charter school in San Antonio. He later resigned after school administrators reportedly reassigned him from a classroom to an office position to limit his interactions with students.
Police allegedly found images on Orta’s cell phone of a girl getting into and out of a shower that were taken without the girl’s knowledge.
Investigators said a 17-year-old student came forward about her sexual relationship with Orta, which she said began with encounters in his school office.
Another 17-year-old student told police she had sexual encounters with Orta on multiple occasions at the teacher’s apartment during lunch breaks.
That relationship continued after Orta resigned, but when the student attempted to end it, she said Orta threatened to kill himself. The teen then told her mother and police, asserting she and her then-32-year-old teacher had “loved each other for several months.”
Somerset Academy Collegiate touts on its website that the school provides “a Social-Emotional curriculum that is embedded into each day.”
Police also said other female students had reported Orta, but he had denied the allegations when questioned by school administrators.
A grand jury indicted Orta on August 20, 2026.
Online records show Orta worked for Somerset as an educational aide in 2022-23 but was moved to an office position in 2023-24.
Orta was not issued a Texas teaching certificate, but he is listed as “under investigation” in the state’s Do Not Hire Registry.
In the past few years, hundreds of Texas school employees have been accused of sex crimes involving students and other children, and thousands have been reported to the Texas Education Agency for sexual misconduct.
The TEA’s Educator Misconduct Reporting Dashboard shows the agency is currently investigating more than 2,700 sexual misconduct complaints and opening an average of 250 new cases each month.
