School district receives mystery e-mail

MEEKER I School district personnel received a rambling e-mail message last week from an unknown sender who it is speculated may be a disgruntled employee or former employee.
“Most of it was just ramblings,” first-year Meeker school superintendent Doug Pfau said of the mysterious message. “I don’t know if it was threatening, but it said if you don’t do this or don’t do that. They wanted us to, basically, survey the whole staff and have them tell us how bad or dysfunctional we are. That’s the gist of it. It was sent to everybody in the district.”
Pfau said the message, when printed, was about 20 pages long. But there was no name attached, other than it signed off “Mrs. Q.”
“It had whatever the e-mail address was, but it didn’t identify who the person was,” Pfau said. “The problem is nobody signs their name to it. And nobody has come forward to say anything one way or another. People in the district are pretty sure it’s someone on staff or this former teacher or that former teacher.”
The message, which was received last week, gave a two-week deadline for the district to act.
“They gave me two weeks to do that (survey district employees),” Pfau said. “The lawyer said don’t respond at all, and the cops did, too.”
Pfau said he was still considering how or if to respond.
“If somebody has a problem, I say come in and talk about it,” Pfau said. “We have procedures for this sort of thing. We have forms they can fill out if they have issues.”
After receiving the message, Pfau said the decision was made to increase security at the district’s administration building.
“We did up our security at the admin building, where the doors are locked and you have to be buzzed in like at the other buildings,” Pfau said. “We’ve had a lot of people say thank you for that. I didn’t perceive (the e-mail message) as a threat, but others did and questioned the stability of the person (who sent it). But if they’re not willing to identify themselves or come in and discuss it, I’m not going to chase ghosts.”