So this Pennsylvania school susepnded a studen for inappropriate behaviour…in his home…by spying on him with a webcam on a school owned laptop…that was remotely activated to spy on the kids at home.
Yes, you read that right, the school is using the computer’s webcams they gave the kids to use and then using it as a basis to suspend for something they did in home, possibly even in their bedroom.
School administrators were giving concealed cameras to teenagers so they could spy on them in their bedrooms? How did somebody think that was a good idea?
Agreed. This is like a black hole of stupid that will (for once!) rightly lead to a ton of lawsuits against the school.
Let’s not beat around the bush here, there’s a very good chance these school administrators turned this and inadvertantly or purposely watched a bunch of teenagers play with themselves.
If these were activated in bedrooms - it seems like there’s a pretty good chance the school administrators could get busted for now having child porn on their computers.
Could this go beyond a simple class action civil suit into criminal behavior?
Did school administrators break any laws by doing this? I can’t imagine that taking unauthorized secret webcam shots of minors in their own homes could possibly be legal in any way, shape or form.
It also raises the specter of the school usurping parental authority. It depends what the “inappropriate behavior” was, of course. But what might be inappropriate to one adult may be allowed or even encouraged by the parents.
Yep, that’s the second prong of this Barbeque Fork of Stupidity. I’ve never understood or condoned the idea that a school or school district could discipline someone for something done off of school grounds or at least outside of the school’s in loco parentis time.
And I’m sure that somewhere in the mountain of papers that almost invariably accompanied the child home at the beginning of the school year was a release concerning this very issue, probably buried in the acknowledgment of receipt of the laptop in the first place.
Understand that this is probably the wealthiest and best school district in the state, in the tonier suburbs of Philly. If there’s any chance of the class action succeeding, it will, because these folks aren’t going to be using ambulance-chaser law firms that advertise on TV for this.
Yeah, Lower Merion is a very interesting place for this to be happening, both because the school has a LOT to lose and because a class action is going to be bringing together a lot of very wealthy people.
It makes no difference what the inappropriate behavior was; no school has any right at all to remotely activate a web cam and spy on students at home. The entire administration of that school should lose their licenses and be fired out of hand.
Not to mention the fact that you can only pull this stunt once before students stop using their laptops, let alone leaving them open while they do inappropriate things (this time it’s not a sexual euphemism!).
At this point, this appears to be only an allegation from a lawsuit filed last week by one boy’s parents, and the school district is denying any knowledge of the spying. It may be that the only idiot is one school administrator. This would make a lot more sense to me than supposed several people or a whole school district thought this was a good idea.
Roddy