Many here have been following this story for months; today, the denouement:
The Lower Merion School District will pay $610,000 to settle lawsuits over its tracking of student laptop computers, ending an eight-month saga that thrust the elite district into a global spotlight and stirred questions about technology and privacy in schools.
School board members voted unanimously Monday night to pay $185,000 to the two students who claimed the district spied on them by secretly activating the webcams on their laptops.
The bulk of the money, $175,000, will be put in trust for Blake Robbins, the Harriton High School junior whose family brought the issue to light in February. Jalil Hasan, who filed his lawsuit this summer after graduating from Lower Merion High School, will receive $10,000.
The district will also pay $425,000 in legal fees to their attorney, Mark S. Haltzman.
[The District, of course, still has to pay its own attorneys, and that could run over a million dollars.]
I know that there will be some here who are disappointed that this isn't going to trial -- who want to see the school administrators publicly filleted under aggressive cross-examination until every single fact was revealed ... but that's not how civil litigation works in America. In 2009, only 0.7% of civil litigation suits in federal court reached trial. The numbers are only slightly higher (1.6%) for civil rights actions.
Why is this? Time, money and risk. Lawyers take up a lot of the first two, and judges, juries and witnesses (the human element) create the third. And federal district court judges are busy enough, and often will strongly encourage the litigants to find some way to resolve matters in advance of trial -- and the litigation process itself provides significant fact-finding benefits to all parties through discovery well before any trial takes place, including the District's own commissioned internal investigation, which found:
Inconsistent policies. Shoddy recordkeeping. Misstep after misstep. "Overzealous" use of technology, "without any apparent regard for privacy considerations."
... [The] report, released Monday night, found that the software activated by the district in the past two years captured nearly 58,000 images, mostly from lost or stolen laptops.
But because no one turned off the tracking system, more than 50,000 of those images were taken after the computers had been recovered and given back to students....
None of the images appeared to show students in a compromising situtation, the report stated, and investigators said they found no proof that school staffers used the technology to spy on students.
Even so, the report portrayed employees in one of the region's elite public school districts as enamored by their cutting-edge technology but repeatedly blinded to its impact.
So, yes, WebcamGate is over, but the fight to preserve personal privacy will continue.