Is ‘Zoom-bombing’ an issue in Beaufort County? Schools address online class concerns
As Beaufort County enters its second month of school closures, concerns about harassment in online classrooms have grown.
Zoom, an online video conferencing platform used by the Beaufort County School District, has exponentially grown during quarantine. According to NPR, the platform’s popularity skyrocketed from 10 million daily users in December to 200 million in March.
But along with the popularity comes a dark side.
Online harassers have started “Zoom bombing” these meetings by anonymously entering and then drawing obscene images, spamming profanity and screaming racial slurs.
The FBI’s Boston office has issued a warning about the practice. New York City’s public schools have banned the use of the platform, transitioning the system’s 1.1 million students to Microsoft Teams after a review of security concerns, TechCrunch reported.
But at an April 7 school board meeting held over Zoom, district officials said those concerns “are not as applicable” to Beaufort County students.
According to a district presentation, which came after several members of the community activist group CARE questioned the use of Zoom for students, the district pays for an “enterprise” Zoom account that comes with a dedicated customer service rep.
That service costs $20 a month per video call “host,” according to the company’s website, with a minimum of 100 hosts required.
According to district technology service officer Mark Chauhan, the district met with Zoom representatives before schools were closed to ensure “the highest security standards were met.”
Staff were required to attend training before getting district Zoom accounts, which included recommendations to share class meeting links privately, create new links for each class and use passwords on class meetings to cut down on public access to online classes.
In addition, class attendees are unable to start video conferencing before the teacher who “hosts” the meetings arrives.
“We do that because just like in classrooms, we do not want to leave students unsupervised,” Chauhan said.
Student accounts can’t host meetings. They are also required to use a name on their display before they’re allowed to join meetings. Teachers can mute students and disable the classroom “chat” to cut down on noise.
CARE member Mike Gleason, who watched the district presentation, said he was “in no position to argue with the IT guy about what the security of that program is,” but wished the district had gone with another platform.
“My gut instinct is from working in banking for over 20 years,” he said. “We didn’t do much with anything that wasn’t a well-established software vendor. My choice would have been to stick with a Microsoft product.”
This story was originally published April 14, 2020 at 4:16 PM.