page_title: Robbins v. Lower Merion School District
section_title: Program
hierarchical_section_title: Robbins v. Lower Merion School District / Laptops with covert cameras / Program
caption_attribution_description: English: Lower Merion High School
context_page_description: Robbins v. Lower Merion School District is a federal class action lawsuit, brought in February 2010 on behalf of students of two high schools in Lower Merion Township, a suburb of Philadelphia. In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and parallel Hasan lawsuits against it.
  The suit alleged that, in what was dubbed the "WebcamGate" scandal, the schools secretly spied on the students while they were in the privacy of their homes. School authorities surreptitiously and remotely activated webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home. After the suit was brought, the school district, of which the two high schools are part, revealed that it had secretly taken more than 66,000 images. The suit charged that in doing so the district infringed on its students' privacy rights. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, ordering the school district to stop its secret webcam monitoring, and ordered the district to pay the plaintiffs' attorney fees.
  The lawsuit was filed after 15-year-old high school sophomore Blake Robbins was disciplined at school for his behavior in his home.
context_section_description: At the beginning of the 2009–10 school year, the school district issued individual Apple MacBook laptop computers to each of its 2,306 high school students. The laptops were for both in-school and at-home use.
  It was part of the school district's One-to-One initiative. The program was piloted in September 2008 at Harriton High School and expanded in September 2009 to Lower Merion High School. It cost $2.6 million, less than a third of which was covered by grants.
caption: Lower Merion High School
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