Lawyers meet over Lower Merion Web-cam photos

Attorneys for the Lower Merion School District and the family suing it over the tracking program and Web-cams on student laptops met Wednesday for more than four hours but did not announce an agreement on how and when parents whose teens were secretly photographed can review the pictures.

The negotiations, which took place in the Philadelphia chambers of a federal magistrate judge, yielded "the beginnings of a framework" for a plan, according to Mark Haltzman, the attorney for Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins and his parents, Holly and Michael.

Haltzman and Hank Hockeimer, the lawyer for the school district, declined to elaborate on their talks with Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter, or to predict whether or when an agreement will come.

How to handle and examine the photos has been one of the most delicate issues to emerge since Robbins filed his lawsuit in February, contending that the district invaded students' privacy by using Web-cams and software to secretly snap their photos and shots of their computer screens.

The school district has acknowledged its employees turned on the Web-cams and remote tracking software on student laptops about 80 times since September 2008, and that the system collected nearly 28,000 photos and a similar number of screen shots. Most of the images were taken by computers that students or staffers had reported lost or stolen, district investigators reported this week.

But the system also collected at least 12,000 images in five or so case where employees forgot or failed to turn off the software after the laptop was returned to the student, Hockheimer said.

Hockeimer also said that a preliminary review by investigators found no "salacious or inappropriate' photos, but cautioned that the probe is continuing. A full report is due May 3.

Robbins attorney has said that the 400 photos snapped last fall by a Web-cam on Blake Robbins' laptop include shots of the 15-year-old sleeping in his bed and shirtless.

Wednesday's meeting had two goals: to devise a way to let parents privately review Web-cam photos of their children while also letting the Robbins collect and examine potential evidence for their lawsuit.

The family is asking a judge to certify their claim as a class-action case, representing any and all of the roughly 2,300 Lower Merion and Harriton students who got laptops from their schools since September 2008.