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The tiny Virginia school district that’s been rocked by still-missing football coach Travis Turner’s child sex scandal has employed accused pedophile teachers before — including a middle school band director who planned to share photos of students with creepo friends online.
Three other Wise County Public Schools teachers — including two who were later convicted — faced charges of child sex crimes over the past five years alone before Travis’ case came to light, The Post has learned.
The tight-knit, football-loving community was thrust into the national spotlight just before Thanksgiving, when Turner, the championship-winning Central High School coach and married father, disappeared amid a child porn and solicitation of a minor probe.
But predators preying on schoolchildren are no strangers to the county, which is home to 5,500 students across 13 schools. And some have gotten away with wrist-slap punishments.
Among them was Dalton Matthew Bates, a band leader at Wise County’s LF Addington Middle School and Union High School who was arrested in 2020 after being caught plotting with a pedo pal to share snaps of his young students.
“I just got a job teaching middle school so I’m gonna be trying to resist temptation,” Bates, then 23, wrote a fellow sicko on Snapchat that year, the Mountain Eagle reported.
“Hopefully I can get pics of students through my fake account and I’ll send u,” he added.
Bates was charged with 20 counts of possessing child pornography, but two years later pleaded guilty to just 10 counts and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years per count — but the years were to be served concurrently and he was credited with time served, meaning he was out soon after confessing his crimes.
Then in 2023, Timothy Lee Meador — a coach and teacher at Union High in Big Stone Gap, where Turner led the football team — pleaded guilty to child solicitation and indecent liberties.
Meador, then 28, spent just over a year in prison.
And as recently as August, Coeburn Middle School teacher Tyler Jay Tibbs was charged with three counts of carnal knowledge — which typically entails sexual intercourse with a kid aged 13 to 15 — along with taking indecent liberties with a child by a person in a supervisory relationship.
Tibbs, 28, was freed on $25,000 bond within weeks, WCYB reported.
Turner, 46, was charged two months later. He coached and taught at Union High School for more than 10 years after joining in 2011, and coached a girls’ softball team elsewhere before that.
The former “Coach of the Year” vanished into the Appalachian woods with a gun while cops were on the way to question him, and there’s been no trace of him since — despite a massive manhunt through the rugged wilderness.
Police have provided no substantive updates since his disappearance.
But community members unloaded on the Wise County school board at a meeting Monday night — with one parent rattling off the names of past sex pests the district has recently employed.
“When there is this much abuse, it’s not just a few bad apples. It is a culture. The fish rots from the head down,” said parent Stephen Murray in a sentiment echoed by many at the meeting, which was the first allowing public comment since Turner vanished.
“This is just the cases that have been reported and charged,” Murray noted.
Murray also read a statement he said was from the girl Turner allegedly victimized, who said she initially felt like she “was the problem.”
“I did not feel like a victim,” the statement read, according to the TimesNews.
“I felt like I was the problem. I felt like I had embarrassed the school, damaged the reputation of the coaching staff and disrupted something I was supposed to protect instead of myself.”
But a man claiming to be her grandfather also spoke and said he was proud of her for coming forward — saying she saved others from harm with her bravery.
Wise County School District did not respond to request for comment.
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