"I suggest you take a breath and relax"

This quote will join "hide the decline" in the annals of FAIL. You may recall the Lower Merion School District, and how it used spy software to take pictures of students in their bedrooms. Well, it seems that someone objected to the use of the spy software, repeatedly. As part of the class action lawsuit brought by the parents, these emails are coming to the light of day.

The only person who objected was a student intern, who sounds like the only one who was thinking like a grownup:

[W]hile you may feel that you can say that this access will not be abused, I feel that this is not enough to ensure the integrity of students and that even if it was no one would have anyway of knowing (especially end users). I feel it would be best that students and parents are informed of this before they receive their computers. And while this only slightly sways my opinion on 1:1, i could see not informing parents and students of this fact causing a huge uproar.

Sounds about right, that. The email was addressed to the person running the program, who replied:

We are not a police state. Lower Merion is one of the few school districts that only filters what we are required by federal law. There is no way that I would approve or advocate for the monitoring of students at home.

I suggest you take a breath and relax.

58,000 pictures (!) later, it seems that the intern saw more clearly than the administrator how things were going to play out. Everyone's all lawyered up, and the town's fighting with its insurance company about the bills:

The Lower Merion School District on Friday argued that the district's insurer should pay what could be a million-dollar tab to resolve a lawsuit over its now-disabled laptop tracking program.

The court has stepped in and issued a permanent injunction to the town, prohibiting the use of monitoring software:

A federal judge has permanently banned the Lower Merion School District from any type of webcam monitoring in what one attorney calls a "huge step forward" in the civil rights lawsuit filed by a Harriton High School student.

In a five-page order, the judge said the district can no longer use webcams or any other intrusive technology to secretly look in on students who were issued laptop computers.

Sanity returns. Sadly, it first had to become a seven figure federal case. Further, the town has to individually notify each student who was photographed, as well as his or her parents.

The court in the case of the Lower Merion School District in Pennyslvania that was spying on its students - in their homes - via webcams and installed in the students’ school-provided laptops - has been ordered to let the students see the photos that the school surreptitiously took of them. As it turns out, the photo of Blake Robbins was just the tip of the iceberg; according to reports, there are nearly 58,000 photos taken by the school district, all by remotely accessing the webcam in the students’ laptops while spying on their students in the students homes and in other places off the school premises.

Hey School Board members - just take a breath and relax!

But that's not all. Apple, it seems, had emailed the school administrator, suggesting caution with the spying thing:

On May 14, 2008, an Apple employee suggested in an e-mail to Ms. DiMedio that she should discuss with the District solicitor “guidelines for Internet connectivity with school district owned computers when they are taken home”:

You will need to ensure that your . . .policy covers the issue and also makes it clear that content placed onto the hard drive is the property of the district and can be examined by district personnel. You just want to be clear on where your responsibility begins and ends with regard to Internet access at home.

You shouldn't need an advanced Education Degree to understand that. Boy, howdy. Even a student intern knew that.

Fail. The voters need to throw out each member of the school board, the mayor, and everyone else with fiduciary responsibility. The the new mayor and school board need to start firing the school administration, starting with the Superintendent and continuing down through the Principal and the IT Chief. Clean them all out, for gross incompetence and failure to use the barest level of due care. Of course, none of that will happen. The consequences won't fall on the government officials, they'll fall on the taxpayers, stuck with a large settlement.

This is the best example I can ever remember for why government services should be outsourced. Ignore that the private sector can almost certainly provide a better quality education at 75% of the cost; nothing like this would ever happen at a private school, because nobody would enroll for the next year. School officials would treat students and their families like customers, rather than annoying subjects to be lorded over.

Public education: you can't even fire someone for taking surreptitious pictures of minors undressing in their bedrooms. No wonder the schools all stink.