“A lawsuit claims the Harriton High School assistant principal told Blake Robbins about improper behavior and cited as evidence a photograph taken from the teens’ school issued laptop,” WTXF reports. “The district says they ‘never did and never would use such tactics as a basis for disciplinary action.'”
WTXF reports, “Parents Michael and Holly Robbins claim an assistant principal disciplined their son using an image obtained using the webcam on his district-issued laptop.”
“On Friday night, Blake Robbins spoke publicly for the first time and revealed what officials thought they caught him doing,” WTXF reports. “‘They thought I was selling drugs because they thought I was popping pills when really I was just eating Mike & Ikes. So they thought that I could possibly be selling drugs, too – which they found out they were wrong about,’ the boy told reporters. ‘I just hope that they’re not watching me.'”
“The school district says it has only utilized the security features to track stolen or missing laptops,” WTXF reports. “Lower Merion Schools issued another update on the matter after 10 p.m. Friday night. ‘At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security- tracking software,’ the update reads. ‘We believe that the administrator at Harriton has been unfairly portrayed and unjustly attacked in connection with her attempts to be supportive of a student and his family. The district never did and never would use such tactics as a basis for disciplinary action.'”
“The Robbins family decided not to stand pat on Friday. They filed a new motion seeking a temporary emergency restraining order against the district,” WTXF reports. “In the new legal documents, the family’s attorneys say Lower Merion ‘has the ability to unilaterally, arbitrarily and capriciously activate and deactivate the camera and software that is utilized to accomplish this invasion of privacy.'”
“They’re seeking the injunction to keep schools from re-activating the webcams in the future and to prevent officials from taking back laptops to delete information, possibly spoiling any evidence,” WTXF reports. “A hearing on that motion will be heard Monday in Montgomery County court. The Robbinses also want their lawsuit to be a class action, claiming the alleged spying was widespread and did harm to many students.”
Read more in the full article here.
Very careful parsing by the school district. The lawsuit never claimed that he was disciplined, just “confronted” with it. They claim to have only activated the cameras 42 times, all for lost, missing or stolen laptops. If they don’t have a contemporaneous police report to go along with each of those 42 times, they were negligent in protecting District property at best and need to be fired on that basis.
The student claims the VP showed him a picture taken from the web cam. Did she, or did she not have such a picture. I don’t see the school directly refuting this claim.
These people think that they have control over every aspect of a kid’s life. They don’t seem to understand that they can’t do anything that they want to do. I hope that they bury that VP and that district. School administrators need to understand that they have boundaries.
A Pennsylvania school district without enough intelligence to understand the rights of it’s students-I can’t believe it. Yes I do….
Why do I sense there is more going on there than first meets the eye? Can this be another ballon boy set-up or White House party crasher episode? Something is fishy.
very very scary monsters
Just make sure that laptops stay within the school facilities.
Then hear the bitchin’ & moanin’.
Electronic privacy is certainly an issue these days. iPhone owners found out after the fact that some social networking features are on by default instead of being turned on by the user. I was furious as I consider my location to be none of anyone else’s business. ATT is much better about privacy than sprint however. The US Constitution and the state constitution require personal information to be available only with a warrant describing the thing the police are searching for. A broad fishing expedition is too broad but first the right to privacy must be defined. Obama’s justice department has taken the wrong track and is currently in court to make cell phone records as good as public as far as privacy is concerned. I think that is wrong and scary.
The first thing a kid should do when taking his MacBook home is put a piece of tape of the camera. The second thing would be to put a white noise generator on the microphone.
Any kid that cannot figure out how to zip up his fly when he is done urinating deserves to have his pee pee on display.
Alright everybody, . . . let’s keep a cool head and civil mouth until we find out the real story here.
The story verges on being a monumental invasion of privacy and an extreme misuse of power by a school district, . . . to being a total pack of lies and fraud instigated by an adolescent and his greedy parents.
Maybe we should be most vocal about getting to the bottom of the truth of this incident, before we make moral judgements.
In the meantime, I think I’ll tape over my iMac’s camera.
Facts guys we need facts.
The school district have denied taking pictures with the camera. The kid says they showed him a picture.
Which is true? I would imagine a log exists on the mac of the alleged activity or even a copy of the picture or video.
Laptops belong to the schools, not the students. Most school districts have policies the students & parents sign. Most tell students that anything on the computer is subject to inspection. Therefore, they do not have privacy on their computers and they know it. The bottom line is that if a student wants privacy, other than doing school work, they should get their own computer.
As to using the camera for checking for alleged drug use or sale, we are not given enough information here. But, because that was off campus, the police would have had to be involved and likely had to get a court order to permit activating a camera to look for drug involvement. It does not sound like that happened here. We don’t have the full story here yet. But, even if the VP messed up, IF she is otherwise good, there is no reason to fire her. Even if this happened, I doubt she would ever do anything like this again. Why is the first thing out of some people’s mouths to “fire” someone? Ever been without a job? Ever made a mistake? And if the student was known to have been involved with drugs, likely also on campus but not yet caught, why defend the kid and his parents who support that kind of activity? Kids are not poor abused angels today. They DO sell drugs. Mind if your kid gets some?
F’ing lawyers r what’s wrong with this world!
Where did the picture come from? Was it taken by the kid himself and then discovered when the laptop was in for tech support? Was it initiated by the VP? I could very well see a student emailing the VP a picture taken from a video chat. More information needs to be disclosed.
Has anyone ever heard of electrical tape?
Is there any way to turn on the camera on a Mac without having the green light next to it come on?
Seems like a weak attempt by the student and his family to cover up whatever the studend did wrong by pushing the blame onto the school. Let’s just wait for the facts to come out though.
Its NOT possible to turn the iSight on without the green light flashing. The LED is part of the cameras power supply.
Do we know if the kid took the picture himself and the school got it when they got the laptop back?
‘At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security- tracking software,’
I can guarantee that is an outright lie. From my experience in K-12 IT there is no way IT would have been able to keep such access from the principles. They are the Gods of the school and IT are the lowest life-form in the system. They would have a meltdown if they were told they weren’t allowed access to the software.
Just return the laptops to the schools and get an iPad with NO Camera, then all will be well and and the school can get a MobileMe account and use the find my iPhone/iPad option.
Lawyers should get IT to get the records of when these “stolen/lost laptops” were turned on by the school and from which administrator’s computer and who was logged in or at least working at that time so they know who to fire!
Terrorists have more rights then our troops and now our school kids. Welcome to the New America!
@TRRosen. Strong words. Clearly, you have personal knowledge of every school district and every administrator in the US. Or is it just your little corner and a school or two from which you get your sour grapes.
I will tell you that there are plenty of places where IT rules, in some cases because it is run by the districts, not the individual schools. I believe that administrators should have control, if necessary for school safety. Some do have access to Remote Desktop at schools with Macs. That is often enough. But they need to work with their IT department for anything beyond that. Some are, but most are still not tech savvy enough to handle things like that on their own.
Further, I think your training at that same school should have taught you that the word is actually “principals.” Of course, you may have actually meant “principles.”
Looking at the issue as it stands now you have to believe the kid. Why? He has zero motive to make this up. He was never disciplined or punished, He isn’t fighting back against an action taken against him by the school. Why create a story about a picture of himself eating mike and ikes. His story rings true the districts reads as a press release written by counsel.
@TRRosen, he has “zero motive” to make this up? There are now allegations of drug involvement here. That’s “zero motive?” We do not yet have the facts. I’d suspect you are still in high school yourself? None of this story sounds fully credible yet on either side. But your pronouncements reek of someone without life experience.
Here are the questions that must be asked:
Was there, or was there not, disciplinary action taken, or threatened, against the student? [The answer we want here is “yes” or “no.” No other answer is acceptable.]
On what basis was the disciplinary action considered by the school? [The answer we want here consists of the “smoking gun;” that is, the evidence against the student, as well as the prohibited action which the school alleges that the evidence represents.]
How was the information underlying the basis for the disciplinary action obtained? [This one should be obvious.]
When these three questions are properly answered, we should have all the facts we need to know what’s going on. Until that time, everyone is just guessing. Or ranting.
The IT people in the school district are supposed to have access to ARD.
I have worked with ARD for many years to monitor the use and health of the client computers.
Anyone using it as such should get in big trouble.