High School Laptops in Pennsylvania secretly view kids at home

Pennsylvania Educators are a little too curious, George

The Lower Merion school issues laptops to all the students.  This is a wonderful thing.  However, the Lower Merion school failed to explain that they had remote cameras installed and could view student behavior off campus.  This is a highly suspect thing.

Who among us has had a 100% success rate teaching our kids to turn anything off when they're not using it?  Me either.  So, here we have laptops sitting open in teenagers' bedrooms, offering someone at the school district the opportunity to view what's going on in that room at the push of a button.  Teenagers are changing clothes and doing all manner of private teenager things in the same room they've left their open laptops running.  What father would risk having a stranger view his teenage daughter buck ass nekkid?  It's not even a little surprising that the parents are bringing a class action law suit against the school district.  What is surprising is that the school feels it will prevail.

Yes, the reason for the cameras is a good one.  It allows the school a higher recovery rate for lost or stolen laptops.  When you're handing out expensive pieces of technology, it makes good sense to be able to track it, especially when you're handing it out to kids.  When i was a kid, i couldn't keep track of anything but a book or a script.  It took me a year to learn to remember where i parked the car.  If i'd had a laptop, it could have ended up anywhere.  The school, however, what with being chock a block full of people with high levels of education and are theoretically smart, should know better than to install a setup that will turn them into Peeping Toms.

If we can find a lost dog with a microchip, why can't they find a lost laptop the same way?  When i remember to take my cellphone with me, i can be found via some wonky GPS device and a bit of triangulation.  Nobody has to hope i open it up and they can guess from the posters on the walls behind my back where on earth this Carmen San Diego might be standing at any given moment.

The school district is going to lose this battle, not just because of the way they track their laptops, but because they broke the rule that every policeman has drilled into their skull..."Reasonable expectation of privacy."  An overheard cellphone conversation on Madison Avenue is fair game.  No reasonable person can have an expectation of privacy when they're standing in a crowd and yelling into an object.  On the other hand, pillow talk is right out. 

The school is banking on the idea that the ends justify the means.  Well, in order to make my truck safe, i desperately need a new brake line installed, but you can bet if i made the guys at Meineke fix it at gunpoint, no law official would agree that having a safe truck made it ok for me to scare the living daylights out of a mechanic.  Most of us could rise higher in our career choices if we knew what the bosses are saying about us at the supper table, but planting a bug in their dining room chandeliers isn't going to win us a get out of jail free card.

The school system has disabled the cameras until everything can be sorted out.  In a way, that's a bit of a shame.  I'd gladly urge the students to make an effort to type with one hand on the keyboard from now on, with first digit of their other hand shoved firmly up their left nostril.

The administrators and teachers of this school district have given us all a valuable lesson.  No matter how educated you are, there's not a book in the world that can teach you one iota of wisdom or common decency.

Lily Robertson, who would NEVER want to see what her son gets up to in his bedroom when the door is closed, can be reached at canopicjargon@gmail.com or on Facebook.