BY JOE ELIAS AND DANIEL VICTOR, The Patriot-News

The youths involved in

are facing felony charges.

Now, based on parents’ complaints, the administrators who caught them might face their own consequences, creating another murky legal issue in the largely untested intersection of children, technology and pornography.

Susquenita High School officials are being investigated after parents claimed pornographic images and videos from cell phones confiscated from students were “passed around” and viewed by more than just those administrators who investigated the incident.

“Of course, one or two people had to see the images to determine what they were,” Perry County District Attorney Charles Chenot said. “But if more than one or two top administrators saw them, there better be a good reason why.”

School employees could be charged with displaying child pornography — the same charges the students involved face — if they showed the images to people not involved in the investigation, Chenot said.

Superintendent Dan Sheats did not return several calls seeking comment Wednesday.

Parents of the students involved contend district administrators “passed around” the images to other employees.

“Why did they willingly view those pics when they already knew what was on those phones?” asked one of the students’ parents. “Keep in mind, a state police officer needs parental signed consent or a warrant signed by a judge to go through cell phones.”

The Patriot-News is not releasing the names of the parents interviewed because it would reveal the identity of the victim of a sex crime.

In October, seven Susquenita High School students were charged with sexual abuse of children, a felony, after a student was found by school officials showing a video clip taken by a cell phone of a sex act on school grounds, state troopers said.

School administrators confronted the students and notified state police after the students admitted their actions, troopers said.

Questioning how administrators handle pornographic images is a new wrinkle in the legal questions surrounding sexting, a confounding issue for law enforcement.

There’s been little agreement on how to handle students involved in sexting, a relatively new phenomenon made possible by advanced cell phone technology. Some district attorneys have aggressively pursued felony charges related to child pornography, while others seek to simply send a message and discourage the behavior.

The Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association has pushed legislation that would make sexting a second-degree misdemeanor. If convicted of a felony related to sexting, children can now be forced to register as sex offenders.

Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. said he hasn’t heard any examples of school administrators being questioned for their involvement.

But authorities have to be careful in handling child pornography, he said. His office doesn’t reproduce the images, not even to provide copies to defense attorneys, he said.

“That child pornography is contraband,” he said. “It’s illegal on its face, and to make any copies of that compounds the problem. Every time a copy of that photograph or video would be made, it revictimizes the child, who's already been exploited.”

David Salter, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said the organization is drafting a policy on how administrators should handle sexting and on what to do when electronic devices are confiscated.

Several of the parents dispute the state police account of how the pictures came to be found. One of the parents said the high school received an anonymous tip and interrogated the students involved until someone confessed.

The criminal cases against the Susquenita students are in the court system. Two parents said the students involved have been ordered to undergo counseling.

Chenot would not comment on the cases, citing privacy law designed to protect minors in the juvenile justice system.

State police said that three girls and five boys took part in the sexting and that the images were exchanged between April 11 and Sep. 22, 2009.