FCPS parent says students saw explicit content at school through video chat website

Yahoo

16-05-2025

An Oakdale Middle School parent said students saw 'explicit sexual content' on their Chromebooks in school as they accessed a video chatting website that the district later blocked.
David Morris said he spoke with other parents whose children saw the sexual content during live video chats while they watched on their Chromebooks in school and on the school bus.
He passed along parents' concerns, and his, in an emailed letter on May 1 to school board members, criticizing the school system's leadership and handling of the issue.
Students in Frederick County Public Schools in March encountered 'inappropriate content' after accessing the video chatting website Thundr while at school, Oakdale Middle School Principal Christine Samuels acknowledged in a community notification sent on May 2.
The website is similar to the permanently shut down website Omegle, in that users can list their interests and be connected online with a random user with similar interests. Thundr matches users through text chat or video chat.
On March 5, an Oakdale Middle School teacher was alerted that students accessed Thundr using their FCPS-issued Chromebooks during school hours, according to the school district.
FCPS said staff members at the school submitted requests to block the website to the school district's Department of Technology Infrastructure on both March 5 and 6.
The website was blocked for students on March 7, according to FCPS.
Eric Louérs–Phillips, a spokesperson for the school district, wrote in an email on Tuesday that 58 students accessed Thundr from the time the complaint was made to when the site was blocked.
FCPS said no other schools reported students having access to Thundr, and the only report was from Oakdale Middle.
The school district added that it has no evidence of students at any FCPS school bypassing site blockers to access the website after the block was implemented.
FCPS regulation specifically prohibits students circumventing security measures, including using a virtual private network instead of the FCPS Wi-Fi.
Morris is a parent with a sixth grade student and an eighth grade student at Oakdale Middle. He said he heard from several other parents whose students were exposed to sexually explicit content.
He wrote an email on May 2 to Rae Gallagher, the president of the Frederick County Board of Education, that a parent from the middle school brought the issue to the school's principal on March 10 — three days after the website was blocked.
Morris wrote in the email that Samuels 'responded as if it was the first she'd heard of it.'
FCPS said Samuels spoke with 'a concerned parent' on March 10, 'at which time the principal learned more detail as to the nature of the content that was accessed by students.'
On May 2, Samuels sent an email to the Oakdale Middle School community, informing families of the incident.
She wrote that in March, when the school first received a report of students accessing the site, 'we believed the incident to be isolated and, therefore, did not share it with the entire school community.'
Samuels wrote that during the week of May 2, 'we learned that before the site was blocked by FCPS, some additional students may have accessed the site or been exposed to inappropriate content and may have shared it with other students.'
Morris said in an interview on Wednesday that he was shocked a website like Thundr would be accessible on FCPS' network.
He said there was no mass communication sent to parents about Thundr until the May 2 email from Samuels, despite how 'all the other kids knew about it.'
Morris added that in addition to the students who used Chromebooks to access the website, 'I don't know how many kids actually were exposed to it through the other kids that had logged in and accessed the website.'
'They were showing it to their friends,' he said. 'Apparently, it became such a big deal that, this was in seventh and eighth grade, that even sixth graders knew about it.'
Morris said it was concerning that Samuels did not immediately 'understand the magnitude' when she spoke with an Oakdale Middle School parent on March 10, since requests to block the site had come from the school on March 5 and 6.
Morris said the responses he received from Oakdale Middle School staff members and the school board 'read like legal disclaimers.'
'There was no ownership. There was no apology,' he said. 'There was nothing other than just a bunch of legal jargon.'