A former assistant principal at North Nicholas High School in Cape Coral faces accusations of inappropriate contact with a student and altering grades in exchange for that contact.<\/p>\n
Jason Punyahotra pled not guilty to charges of inappropriate conduct with a student and tampering with or harassing a witness, victim or informant. Both charges are felonies.<\/p>\n
Punyahotra is scheduled to be arraigned at 8:30 a.m. Monday in Lee County Court.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
According to a police report, the investigation began after a student submitted a tip through the Fortify Florida app. Interviews with former students revealed accusations of Punyahotra spending time alone with students in classrooms and making them uncomfortable with his touch.<\/p>\n
One interviewee claimed Punyahotra and an unnamed student engaged in sexual activity in front of a Publix; however, there were conflicting details about the incident.<\/p>\n
An affidavit revealed Punyahotra was previously accused of touching an eighth grader’s thigh at a middle school in 2018. That case was dropped due to lack of cooperation from the parents.<\/p>\n
The school district placed Punyahotra on administrative leave and subsequently fired him once they were informed of the accusations in September.<\/p>\n
Cape Coral grandfather Glen Gard expressed his outrage over the situation.<\/p>\n
“I would be furious,” Gard said. “I might even be the one to lead the charge with the parents to go in there and make sure something’s done immediately.”<\/p>\n
WINK News will be on the scene to provide updates on the proceedings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former assistant principal at North Nicholas High School in Cape Coral faces accusations of inappropriate contact with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,11105,3904,11106],"class_list":["post-12090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-jason-punyahotra","tag-lee-county-court","tag-north-nicholas-high-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}