High Mowing School has issued a statement to the community condemning a prank in which students’ faces were photo-shopped onto inappropriate images in the school’s yearbook.
Head of School Kathleen Meyer stated that the school had communicated their “profound disappointment and apologies” to all students, faculty and staff at an all-school meeting last week.
“Thank you very much for your understanding and support as we navigate this situation,” Meyer wrote.
According to Meyer’s statement, the yearbooks were distributed to students on June 1, but the school confiscated the yearbooks after the images were discovered, and that the school “cannot allow the yearbooks to remain in our student’s possession in their current state.”
High Mowing plans to either remove the pages or reprint the yearbooks.
The statement says “facial photos of High Mowing students were super-imposed onto inappropriate images of men, women, and ancient statues of human beings.”
Meyers said that the images were “improper and tasteless, and not reflective of the school’s values or the care and concern we have for our students and their wellbeing.”
Meyer stated that the school will be investigating how the pages got into the yearbook.
“We are undertaking a full review of how these pages materialized and the approval of the processes that were in place at the time. We will use what we learn to update our policies and procedures around content development, formatting and approvals to ensure we have the necessary and appropriate checks in place to prevent something like this from happening again,” Meyer wrote.