Berkeley High School students were in the middle of a video conference on Tuesday when a man joined the Zoom meeting, exposed himself and shouted obscenities, the district’s superintendent told parents Wednesday.

Superintendent Brent Stephens told parents the man somehow “obtained the credentials for the meeting and was able to gain access to the session.”

“What is especially troubling about this incident is that it appears that the teacher followed all the current guidance about security precautions in Zoom,” Superintendent Stephens wrote in an email sent Wednesday afternoon.

Berkeley Unified School District has temporarily suspended all video conferencing, Stephens said, stating “it is simply unacceptable to ignore a risk of this significance.”

A Berkeley police spokesperson said the department is investigating the incident.

“The pause in the use of Zoom and further evaluation of video-conference platforms will also allow us to evaluate the level of training and verification that we’ll have to insist on before any educator invites students to interact live online,” Stephens wrote. “Even with the built-in security features, we have 800 teachers who must understand the platform and have a baseline knowledge about how to handle a security issue in real time. Also, each of our 10,000 students and their families must use a BUSD email address, itself a significant communication and support challenge.”

Related Articles Alameda County has reported a huge COVID-19 death total in recent weeks. Here’s why.

Pac-12 football will be back in 2020, but the specifics remain a mystery

There’s live theater to see in the East Bay — all you need is GPS

Pac-12 football: Cal, Stanford working to return but local health officials must sign off

California recalls N95 masks from Santa Clara company with $90 million state contract In an email sent Tuesday, Superintendent Stephens told parents two students “behaved inappropriately” during one call and that police were looking into “illegal activity from an adult who appeared on screen during a Zoom instructional session at Berkeley High School.” The superintendent said parents who students on the video call were notified earlier.

“You may have heard that school districts across the country are dealing with issues of ‘Zoom bombing’ in which people join public meetings and say or do inappropriate things,” Stephens said Tuesday. “We put many controls in place that we had thought would protect our online sessions.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders, “Zoom bombers” have disrupted public meetings, including in Lafayette, by yelling obscenities or broadcasting pornography, but until now, those virtual settings locally had not taken place in a classroom or in the presence of minors. Berkeley Unified School District is “asking our teachers to stop using Zoom and Google Meet for online meetings while we look into whether we can truly assure student safety in this context.”