Concord Police computer crimes experts are looking deeper into several online incidents that subjected middle and high school students to sexually explicit images and racial slurs over Zoom this week.
The school district identified five separate incidents of “an unidentified intruder impersonated a student to join Zoom meetings,” according to Director of Technology Pam McLeod. Four incidents were reported in classes at Concord High and one was reported at Rundlett Middle School.
“We believe these incidents are related.,” McLeod wrote in a letter to families, students and teachers Friday morning.
The district began looking into reports late Wednesday that Concord High School students were exposed to lewd images during virtual learning.
One incident involved a video of a naked man and a second showed a video of a naked woman. In another impersonation, a person was shown with a toy gun. Parents of students in a physical education class were also notified Wednesday of “racist and harmful” remarks made by an intruder in the Zoom chat function. In each instance, the teacher immediately removed the user from the virtual classroom.
“At least one of the incidents was recorded by a student and circulated on social media,” wrote McLeod, who also serves as the district’s chief information security officer. “The district was notified of this existence of this video late Wednesday evening.
Further, the district learned of a similar incident Thursday during a class of Rundlett Middle School students. The intruder showed inappropriate images to students and, once again, the classroom teacher immediately removed the intruder from the session, officials said.
“The Concord Police Department is currently investigating any relationship between the two incidents,” McLeod wrote, referring to the series of interruptions at Concord High and the incident at the middle school.
The district was cautious this semester about implementing remote learning through Zoom due to reports across the country of security issues with the platform this past spring, McLeod said in an interview Thursday. Since then, teachers have received extensive training, and all classes use the waiting rooms feature so that teachers can see who has logged in and approve each account to enter an active session, she said. Zoom also allows students to break out into small group sessions – an option other platforms like Google classroom, which was used by the district in the spring, don’t allow for.
“We understand and share your concerns about these violations and are dismayed that such incidents take away from valuable learning opportunities for our students – we are doing all we can to determine the cause and the person(s) behind these incidents,” McLeod wrote in her letter Friday morning.
She told the community that teachers were using the incidents as a teaching point to remind students that it is a violation of district policy to share passwords or classroom meeting links, or to take a phone recording of any virtual learning session.
“Recording others without their permission could be a violation of laws around wiretapping and/or distribution of sexual images,” she wrote.
In addition to notifying the school, parents and teachers are mandatory reporters under New Hampshire law and must report to police or the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families if they have knowledge that children were exposed to sexually explicit content over the internet.