School Captured 56,000 Images from Student Laptops

Finally the truth about Lower Merion's use of remote monitoring software on student laptops: On Monday, the District's lawyer admitted that the school system captured 56,000 images of students, although thankfully "none of the images appeared to be salacious or inappropriate." Back in February, the District's website declared that they only activated the software to locate lost, stolen or missing laptops: "The district has not used the tracking feature or webcam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," the Web site said. Conclusion: there must be an awfully lot of missing laptops in the richest school district in Pennsylvania and one ...

NYTimes: Prosecutors Gone Wild

The New York Times editorialized today about sexting: Schools across the country are understandably concerned about students “sexting” — sending sexually suggestive photos and text messages by cellphone. But a Pennsylvania school district went too far when it referred several female students for criminal prosecution after their images showed up on other students’ phones and they refused to participate in an antisexting education program. A federal appeals court was right to rule last week that parents had the right to block the district attorney from prosecuting the girls. In the fall of 2008, officials in the Tunkhannock ...

Lower Merion Parents Say No to Lawsuit

This just in from Philly.com: A group of Lower Merion and Harriton High School parents met to discuss ways to derail the possibility that a federal lawsuit over laptop spying could lead to a lengthy and expensive class-action case against their district. Bryn Mawr resident Michael Boni, one of the organizers, said yesterday: "We have spoken to our neighbors and friends, and it seemed that there was a groundswell of opposition to one family with one lawyer bringing this action on behalf of the community." He said the parents were "not suggesting there weren't problems" with how the district has handled the laptop issue. "But we don't think [a class-...

School District PREYing on Students

The Lower Merion School District recently admitted to activating the webcams on 42 "missing" school-owned laptops without the knowledge or permission of students and their families. Surprisingly, the software that performs this function is not only widely available, it's free and downloadable by anyone. One such program is called Prey. It's open source and was recently discussed in this TechRepublic video. Prey is a lightweight program which runs in the background and is completely hidden to the end user. It's built in modules so an administrator can choose whether or not to install certain features like the ability to activate a laptop's webcam. ...

First Amendment Fiasco – Student Speech Confusion

From The Legal Intelligencer: Lawyers were scratching their heads on Thursday over a federal appellate court's seemingly conflicting rulings in a pair of closely watched student-speech cases that both involve high school students who were suspended for creating fake MySpace pages on their home computers to ridicule their principals. Although the cases appeared at first glance to raise nearly identical legal questions about the limits on a school's power to discipline students for off-campus speech, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the student in Layshock v. Hermitage School District and with the school in J.S. v. Blue Mountain ...

Facebook Gestapo?

Now that Facebook is no longer pimping our children, the public school system is rushing to fill the void. Still smarting from getting whacked by the Supreme Court for strip searching middle school students over asprin, our ever-inventive educational industrial complex is devising innovative new ways to keep impertinent students in line. Not surprisingly, their tactics are focusing on sexting and social networking. In one recent case, a high school student in Mississippi is suing her local school district after a teacher logged into the student's Facebook account and distributed information that embarrassed her and led to her removal from the ...

Sexting might be IN but Strip Searching is definitely OUT

By now the story of Savana Redding is well known, at least to readers of this blog where we have been discussing this case for almost a year. After escorting 13-year-old Savana Redding from her middle school classroom to his office, an assistant principal accused her of distributing over-the-counter pain relief pills to fellow students. Savana denied the allegations and agreed to a search of her belongings. Finding nothing, the assistant principal then sent Savana to the school nurse for a strip-search. That search also turned up nothing. Savana’s mother filed suit against the school district and the staff members who authorized and participa...

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