Mount Greylock High School Investigating Racist ‘Zoom Bomb’
Mount Greylock Regional School is investigating an incident of an intruder entering a virtual classroom to target a student with racist audio.
I berkshires.com reports that principal Jacob Schutz and Assistant Principal Colin Shebar notified the school community of the Thursday incident in a campus-wide email at 4:56 yesterday, about four hours after the school acknowledged the incident on its Twitter account.
According to the school's incident report, which was shared in the email, at the end of a high school class, a student lied his or her way into the room and played a song that involved the lyric, "f***k the (n-word)."
The incident report goes on to explain the outreach from school staff to the student targeted and his or her family.
Schutz tweeted and included in the email blast,
"Mount Greylock Regional School is committed to being a community that promotes the ideals of diversity, belonging, inclusion and equity, We recognize the presence of systemic racism and pledge to do the work to build an antiracist school community. Racist actions have no place at MGRS."
Later that evening, Schutz said the school had notified the Williamstown Police Department about the incident but declined to say the extent to which outside agencies are assisting school personnel with the investigation.
Schutz also said the school is operating under the assumption that the perpetrator is a student at the middle-high school.
Schutz said.
"I would say we have no reason to believe it's anybody other than a student based off of how our Zoom information is published and available to students," That being said, it's not foolproof."
Schutz said he is aware of no incidents to date where an individual outside the school community has entered one of the school's virtual classrooms.