Intruder posts racist, pornographic content in Lee County virtual classroom

Now, Lee County Schools is trying to identify the person who displayed content that was disturbing for everyone watching.

Parents were shocked to hear that this happened as early as the first day of classes on Monday.

Lee County Schools has declined multiple requests for an interview, but a spokesperson told WRAL News that officials believe the person who gained access was not a student and that deputies are not involved in trying to track the person down.

"There were pictures of Nazi symbols," said Shauna Roberts, a concerned parent.

Roberts is still in shock over the violent and pornographic videos she said played out from her daughter’s computer on the first day of virtual classes for Lee County High School.

"They were showing videos of African Americans being shot. There were also pictures of Donald Trump along with the KKK that were popping up. It was just disturbing all the way together," she said.

The incident happened on Google Meet during a 10th grade Spanish class. About 20 students and a teacher were logged on. Roberts said it lasted about 30 minutes, and at times she could hear someone in the background using racial slurs.

“You could actually see parents coming into the camera seeing the content as well. You could see a couple of parents actually making their kids move away from their computer so they could see what was going on," said Roberts.

Lee County Schools said the person was removed as quickly as possible, writing, “It appears that this was an inadvertent approval of an outside address requesting access; however, the incident is currently under investigation by both law enforcement and the district’s technology department. We take the security of online classes very seriously and are reviewing all protocols to make sure this does not happen again.”

“I think it’s just sad that our children are supposed to be online learning but they are being exposed to this type of content," said Roberts.

She wants the person responsible to be arrested.

The school system said the School Resource Office is gathering information to be turned over to Lee County detectives.

Lee County is not the only district dealing with unwanted visitors in classes.

Wake County Public Schools are also tightening security in the virtual classroom after a group of Wake County students accessed 20 classes and used offensive language towards their classmates and teachers.

Wake County said they have identified the students responsible. Lee County is still trying to track down the person responsible for intruding in their classroom.

Both Lee and Wake County school districts use Google Meet for virtual live instruction, which only requires a school email and a code to join the class.

These codes are relatively easy to find on some school websites, making it pretty easy for students to join classes that they are not enrolled in.

Officials from Wake County schools said, "The access to all these classes came directly from our 'Teacher Classrooms Document.'”

It took just minutes to find similar documents — with dozens of access codes — posted on the homepage of several other school websites.