A West Springfield Middle School teacher has been charged with child rape.
James Parks of Southampton has pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released on $1,000 bail and ordered to have no contact with the alleged victim and no unsupervised contact with children.
Southampton Police Chief David Silvernail said Parks was arrested last month after police received a complaint. According to police, the relationship began when the girl, who is now 15, was in the sixth-grade.
Police did not say how he knew the girl.
But West Springfield school officials, while confirming that the 54-year-old Parks was a seventh-grade science teacher, said no students from West Springfield were involved in the case.