For four days, a 29-year-old woman pretended to be a student at a New Jersey public high school. She attended classes, spent time in the guidance office and collected phone numbers from teenagers who helped her find her way through the maze of corridors, according to students and a school official.
She continued to text her former classmates days after the hoax was discovered last week, the students said.
The woman, identified by police as Hyejeong Shin, was arrested Tuesday and charged with providing documents that falsified her age to officials at New Brunswick Public Schools, a school district with nearly 10,000 students in central New Jersey.
The incident, first reported by New Brunswick todayraised concerns about the safety procedures in place to verify students’ identities — and why the woman snuck into a school that accepted children as young as 15 in the first place.
Aubrey A. Johnson, the superintendent of the school, told board members Tuesday night that the district would evaluate “how to better find fake documents and other things,” according to a video of the meeting. shared on Twitter. Neither the school nor the police official provided any information on what might have led to her behaviour.
Shin, of New Brunswick, NJ, provided a false birth certificate to school officials, which is a third-degree crime, according to a spokeswoman for the city’s Police Department.
New Jersey schools must temporarily enroll all children in school, even if no records are normally provided to verify identity or prove they live in the community.
From that point on, students have 30 days to provide additional proof of identity or the district has the option of declaring them ineligible for class, according to the superintendent.
Mr Johnson said in a statement: “Once our staff determined that they were dealing with fraudulent information, they immediately notified the appropriate authorities.
Ms. Shin has been banned from the school grounds and students are advised to stop all contact with her.
The story seems like a return to “Never Been Kissed” and “Hidefilm PG-13 rating introduced The mischievous pranks of adults posing as high school students to report a news story and hide from the Mafia.
But students at New Brunswick High School said they were worried that Ms. Shin’s behavior showed her motives were much less humorous.
Nearly a dozen students showed up at Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting to voice concerns about the incident but were not allowed to speak because regulations require speakers to be pre-registered.
The students told a reporter for New Brunswick Today, in a video posted to YouTubethat Ms. Shin had requested to meet at least some of the people she had met at a location outside the school.
One teenage girl, who identified herself as Tatiana, said that the night before the woman was arrested, she received a text message from Ms. Shin that made her feel scared for her safety.
“All I wanted to do was make her feel comfortable in a new school,” she said.
“If she has the ability to forge documents, get into a public high school, be in close contact with young students,” she added, “she is capable of anything.”
Calls to a New Brunswick resident with the same name as the 29-year-old went unanswered. Neither the mayor of New Brunswick nor his spokesman answered calls.
Alain Delaquérière contribution research.
