AUBURN – A jury listened Tuesday as a former Park Avenue Elementary School music teacher confessed his urges for touching the buttocks of little girls.

The jury also heard two of his former students – ages 7 and 8 – testify that he did it to them.

It was the first day of testimony in the trial of James Raymond Jr., 27, in Androscoggin County Superior Court. He is charged with two counts of unlawful sexual touching and three counts of assault.

Each charge carries a maximum penalty of up to a year in jail.

Shortly before the state rested its case Tuesday, prosecutors played about an hour of a videotaped interview of Raymond by an Auburn police detective. During that interview, Raymond admitted his weakness for touching his students.

“I recognize that I have a problem,” he was seen on a television monitor telling Detective Chad Syphers. “And I recognize the problem right now is at the stage where I get the desire at school to feel little girls’ legs and sometimes their bottoms.”

He told Syphers, “It’s only been a few kids” because the opportunity didn’t present itself often.

He said he’d never touched other parts or asked a student to perform a sexual act. “The most that I’ve done … is, like, the hand up the skirt,” he said.

One of his former students, wearing pink pants and shirt, her hair pinned back by barrettes, said she was in Raymond’s music class last fall. She was sitting on the floor in a circle when he beckoned her to sit next to him. “He put his hand up my skirt” as she crouched on her knees, she said. His actions “made me feel scared,” she said. He touched her buttocks twice, she said.

She told her mother and, later, a teacher. She said she tried to get out of going to school because “he might do it again.” As the kids lined up to go to Raymond’s class again, the girl told a teacher what he had done, she said.

Another girl, wearing a dress, her hair in pigtails, sat on the witness stand, her head barely clearing the rail.

She said she was leaving a portable classroom when Raymond squatted beside her and touched her buttocks. She said she told him, “Mr. Raymond, don’t do that.” She told the prosecutor that Raymond said he was sorry.

Another girl, who is 14, said she was in the fifth grade at the former Webster Intermediate School auditorium for a talent show when Raymond dropped a piece of a camera under a table. When he went to retrieve it in the darkened theater, he touched her leg from ankle to knee, she testified Tuesday. The encounter made her “very uncomfortable,” she said.

The girl had been singing in the school’s chorus and chamber group. She later dropped out of the groups, she said, citing troubling behavior on Raymond’s part.

Raymond told Syphers during the interview at the Auburn police station that he had subscribed to child pornography Web sites in the past that featured photos of nude children. He said he stopped viewing those photos. He also had been seeking a job with older students to help him resist temptation, he told Syphers.

“Every night I read the Bible, I pray and I want help and I ask for help,” he said.

Raymond was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt during his trial. His lawyer, Walter McKee of Augusta, is expected to present the defense’s case Wednesday morning.

McKee told the jury that his client “did not sexually touch, did not assault, did not do anything inappropriate.”

A talented musician and an excellent teacher, Raymond “put his entire heart into what he did,” McKee said.

He pointed out that, in each alleged instance, there were other kids around. No witnesses corroborated the claims made by the girls, he noted.

The second girl to report she had been touched by Raymond had denied his actions at first when asked by her mother whether he had done anything inappropriate to her. Only when her mother pressed her a second time and asked her specifically about parts of her body did she offer her story, McKee said.

Assault and sexual touching charges involving another alleged victim were dropped before the trial.

Raymond, who lives in Auburn, is free on $5,000 cash bail, but is confined to his home most of the day.