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Settlement near in Web cam suit?

Attorneys for the Lower Merion School District spent more than four hours Wednesday discussing a possible financial settlement with the Penn Valley parents whose son sued the district over its secret laptop tracking program, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

Attorneys for the Lower Merion School District spent more than four hours Wednesday discussing a possible financial settlement with the Penn Valley parents whose son sued the district over its secret laptop tracking program, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

The sources declined to disclose specifics of the negotiations or to say how close the sides might be to a deal.

The negotiations, supervised by Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter in his Philadelphia chambers, mark the latest step in the district's effort to end the furor over the program and resolve the invasion-of-privacy suit filed by Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins and his parents, Holly and Michael Robbins.

Lower Merion School Board President David Ebby and lawyers for the district sat in on the talks, as did the Robbinses and their attorney. Afterward, no one would discuss particulars.

"I cannot comment at all as to whether there were any settlement discussions," said Mark Haltzman, the lawyer for the family.

The negotiations came two days after district officials disclosed that in 80 instances since September 2008, its employees had turned on the Web cams and remote tracking software on the laptops it gave high school students. The system collected nearly 56,000 images, including photos of students and the insides of their homes, as well as screen shots showing their open files, Web sites, and online chats.

Most of the data came from laptops that students had reported lost or stolen, which was the reason district administrators implemented the tracking system. But the system - which snapped and stored a new photo every 15 minutes when laptops were running - also collected at least 12,000 images in the five or so instances where school technicians forgot or failed to turn off the software even after a student found the computer, officials have determined.

And in 15 or so cases, investigators have not found an explanation of who ordered a student's laptop to be tracked or why.

The district's lawyer, Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., has said that a preliminary review found no "salacious or inappropriate" images, but cautioned that the district's investigation - and others - are continuing. A full report is due May 3.

Blake Robbins' attorney has said that 400 photos taken last fall by the Web cam on the 15-year-old's laptop include shots of Blake sleeping in bed and standing shirtless. An assistant principal later confronted the teen with a photo that appeared to show him holding pills; Robbins has said it was Mike & Ike candies.

The system was designed to purge photos after lost or stolen laptops were located, but forensic investigators hired by Lower Merion have since recovered most of the Web cam images. How to handle those images has been one of the most delicate issues to emerge since Robbins filed his lawsuit in February.

Wednesday's talks yielded "the beginnings of a framework" for letting district parents whose teens were photographed review those images in private, Haltzman said.

Neither he nor Hockeimer, the lawyer for the district, would elaborate or say when that process might begin.

District officials have pledged to be transparent about the findings of their internal investigation, and agreed to let the magistrate judge oversee the process of notifying parents and showing them the photos.

"We're not withholding any information, and we have no desire to," Ebby said.

But the process is fraught with complications, the lawyers have said. Students who have turned 18 - adults in the eyes of the law - might not want parents to see their photos or screen conversations. Others may have been captured by another student's Web cam.

The Robbinses have sought class-action status for their suit, saying their claim represents any and all of the roughly 2,300 students at Lower Merion and Harriton High Schools who were issued laptops since 2008.

Some parents have hired their own lawyers. One group has asked to be excluded from any class-action suit. Another successfully petitioned U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois last week to limit access to the photos only to the attorneys in the case.

FBI agents and investigators from the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office have launched their own probes to see if any criminal laws were broken.

Wednesday's meeting also resulted in one of the more unlikely scenes in the now two-month-old saga. As lawyers shuttled in and out of the judge's chambers, they left their clients - Ebby and the Robbinses - to sit alone in the near-empty courtroom.

It was the first time the school board president and the couple had met.

For nearly 30 minutes, they chatted less like foes in a legal dispute that has garnered worldwide publicity, and more like amiable parents at a Little League game.

All three grew up around the same time in the district and have schooled their children there. They talked about parenthood and tossed names of old friends and classmates back and forth, looking for mutual friends or acquaintances. Holly Robbins realized her mother once lived on the same street as Ebby's family.

Later, as the talks wound down and Ebby prepared to leave the courtroom, she thanked him for letting her borrow his phone.

No problem, the school board president said.