Lancaster Country Day AI incident moves lawmakers to push changes in mandatory reporting law

• By Ashley Stalnecker/LNP | LancasterOnline

Three Lancaster County lawmakers are working on legislation that would require school administrators to report the discovery of any artificially generated sexually explicit images depicting minors, regardless of whether the perpetrator is a minor.

The push to create such legislation comes in the wake of a high-profile case at Lancaster Country Day School, a private school where two male students were charged in December 2024 with creating and sharing hundreds of altered images and videos depicting dozens of their classmates in sexually explicit situations.

The cases have not yet gone to trial. In August, Erik Yabor, spokesperson for the Lancaster County District Attorney’s office, said the investigation was ongoing into the charges both males face, including criminal conspiracy, sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of obscene materials to minors.

State Sens. James Malone and state Rep. Nikki Rivera, both Democrats, and GOP Sen. Scott Martin said the testimony of one Lancaster Country Day student helped influence their separate efforts to craft legislation to better address the issue.

Mandatory reporters, which include school employees, are legally required to report any suspected child abuse, but Country Day administrators, after learning of the altered sexual images through an anonymous tipline in November 2023, did not report them as suspected child abuse.

“I honestly feel that the immediate breakdown was in the adults in the room not immediately contacting the police,” Malone said Monday. “Regardless of you know, one day, six days, 10 days, every bit of time that you’re a victim of that kind of action is reprehensible… I don’t feel that this should have happened at all”

At the time, the district attorney said the crimes didn’t fit the definition of child abuse under current mandatory reporting law. Harm in which both parties are minors is exempted from the definition of child abuse, except for a list of offenses including rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault, or indecent exposure.

“Lancaster Country Day School is mindful of the many ways in which technology can be misused and the impact this can have on students,” school spokesperson Maddy Pontz wrote in an email statement on Monday. “The School has policies in place to address these matters, and we support legislative efforts to assist all schools in protecting students from the risks generated by ever-evolving technologies.”

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Lancaster County lawmakers propose amendments

Malone’s bill, introduced in late September, would include “all instances of child sexual abuse imagery” under the definitions of child abuse in mandatory reporting law.

“Hopefully this means that, going forward, adults who are trained” on the mandatory reporting law will know that AI-generated images are “bad. You must do something about it’,” Malone said.

Rivera said her planned bill will closely match Malone’s.

“As a former school teacher myself and mandated reporter, I want to make it very clear and very simple for school staff that when you of course, we already know that when you see something, you’re supposed to say something, and it should apply also to child-on-child incidences,” said Rivera, a former Manheim Township school board president. “We want to make sure that the loop is closed when it comes to that type of issue.”

Martin joined Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, R-Montgomery, in announcing plans to introduce legislation amending mandatory reporting law to include child sexual abuse material created using artificial intelligence.

If Pennycuick’s legislation had been on the books last year, Country Day students wouldn’t have experienced “six more months of agony” after administrators had initially been tipped off to the creation of the explicit images, Pennycuick said.

In the Country Day case, the AI-generated images were first reported to administrators in November 2023, but were not disclosed to some of the affected students until the following May, while other students were not informed until November 2024 when they were asked to identify themselves in the images.

“Getting this bill across is a priority,” Pennycuick said. “We want to make sure that AI-generated (child sexual abuse material) doesn’t go any further and mandatory reporters are actually reporting what they should be reporting.”

Pennycuick noted the bill was written with the direct involvement of stakeholders like the Lancaster County Day student.

The main difference between the Malone and Pennycuick proposals lies in where amendments to the mandatory reporter law would be placed, she said. While the two have yet to discuss their proposed bills with each other, Pennycuick said they will likely have a conversation soon.

Once introduced, her legislation will “leave less room for there to be confusion or opportunities to skate through,” Pennycuick added.

“Protecting children from emerging threats in the digital world is a critical need,” Martin wrote in a statement via text Monday. “Senator Pennycuick, Senator (Lisa) Baker and I have worked carefully on this specific issue for many months with stakeholders and families and we hope to bring forward comprehensive legislation addressing mandated reporting very soon.”

The fact that there’s a bipartisan effort to listen to a survivor and identify the best fix for the mandatory reporting law is a positive sign, said Cathleen Palm, founder of Berks County advocacy group The Center for Children’s Justice.

“What’s important is they both have the same goal, which is to make it clear that things like this, like the AI-generated pornography, those types of generated harmful materials are something that are reportable,” Palm said.

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READ: How should Lancaster Country Day School have handled the deepfake? An explainer on Pa. law

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Changing mandatory reporting law

In addition to including instances of child sexual abuse imagery in mandatory reporting law, Palm said legislators should go one step further by requiring legislators to revisit the language annually or biennially and ensure it’s still working to protect children.

One of the last times the law was revisited was in 2014, after former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of child sexual abuse.

And sometimes, Palm said, legislators make changes to the state crimes code that are not immediately reflected in mandatory and child protective services laws.

In October 2024, state law on the unlawful dissemination of intimate images was updated to include definitions for artificial intelligence, artificially generated sexual depiction, generative artificial intelligence and photo editing software. Law on the criminal offense of sexual abuse of children was also updated to define and include “artificially generated child sexual abuse material”.

Yet, mandatory reporting law has still not been revised to reflect those changes.

Pennycuick said she agrees with Palm that mandatory reporting law should be regularly revisited to keep up with revisions to criminal law and technological changes, and that her legislation would require lawmakers to return to the statute every two to three years.

“Especially with AI right now, I think we’re going to have to stay on top of as the technology changes and advances, our laws are going to have to keep up with that,” Pennycuick said.

Rivera said she hadn’t considered including language in her proposed legislation to regularly revisit mandatory reporting law but said “to face what problems we do have and what is happening to people and address them is definitely our responsibility as legislators.”

While she doesn’t currently plan to include in her bill an expansion of who is identified as a mandatory reporter, Rivera said she believes the law should extend to all adults.

“I really do wish that all adults would take the responsibility of reporting crimes against children to authorities and to ChildLine,” Rivera said. “In my own moral book that is expected. I expect that of myself, and I do just wish that all adults would take on that responsibility when it comes to protecting children from crimes against them.”