reliving evil spying laptops in lower merion school district.

Posted on April 9, 2025 by carla

Wow. I think I will have to actually watch this twice to catch it all but I just finished Spy High. It’s well worth watching and it’s not just because although I had no kids in Lower Merion School district when this occurred, I was still living there. Some of my friends were right in the middle of this and I knew people who had kids in the high schools then.

This was in general a crazy time then. Friends of mine in Ardmore were also fighting redistricting. And the redistricting was insane. Literally they were spreading out minority students. And then of course there was this whole walk zone thing that affected the kids who walked from different places in Ardmore to Lower Merion High School. I swear some of the streets on the “no no” list were literally added because some residents didn’t want kids walking around their neighborhood….even going to school.

Click to access lowermerionbrief.pdf

So yeah, I wrote about evil spying laptops when it was happening and after the fact. It was one of the creepier things that Lower Merion School District has ever done, and well it’s a long list for creepy things that the school district has done over time. What price first class, right?

evil spying laptops: when something a community lived through becomes a docuseries

So where to begin ? This one random day a man contacts me about the laptop scandal in Lower Merion. He was working on a documentary series about this.

Initially, he kind of wanted to talk to me and maybe did I want to be interviewed since I had blogged about it a lot ? I said thank you for asking, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate because I didn’t have kids in the school district back then I just had friends involved in the issue. And I also no longer lived in Lower Merion. So I offered to connect him to my friends.

So guess what? That was Jody McVeigh-Schultz… the director of “Spy High.” Life is just very random sometimes.

I realize that a lot of people don’t like bloggers and they don’t like me as a blogger in particular, so that was a definite factor as well in me saying no I shouldn’t be interviewed. And it’s not my story personally to be part of and it’s not just the story of Blake Robbins, who was one of the named defendants in one of the lawsuits and a part of this series.

There were a lot of victims in this and I’m glad this series is out now and I hope it’s so many people watch it because Lower Merion School District kind of made this go away in my opinion. The phrase swept this under the rug comes to mind….

There’s one person in particular whom I am glad finally got to tell his story. And he’s the young man whom my friend Lynn (who is also in the series) is very fond of and really good friends with his mother, June. His name is Keron Williams. And also another young man named Jalil Hasan. They both shine through in this series with quiet grace and dignity.

You see, the story always had the Robbins family kind of at the center of it and it’s not just about them. I don’t know them, and after watching this entire series, I am reminded once again at the inequity within this issue even within the financial settlements. How is it that the white student got so much more money than the black students? Especially when you think about the fact that at one of the black students had the same lawyer as the white student?

I have to be honest that the series made me sad as good as it was because you see how kids lost part of their childhood with this. And how this affected their families and community as well.

One thing I was really pleased to see in the series is in my opinion how visually uncomfortable the lawyer for Lower Merion School District was while being interviewed. And of course, Lower Merion School District wanted no parts of being interviewed for this.

I’m not a fan of Lower Merion School District. I have not been for a very long time. There was what I experienced my brief time there at Welsh Valley before going to Shipley, and then there’s just all the crap that they have pulled and tried to pull over the years.

Welsh Valley was really an eye-opening experience as to the mentality of the school district and a lot of the kids. I might be almost 61, but I can still see in my mind‘s eye the penultimate mean girls strolling down the halls in their crotch-splitting tight jeans and Candies flipping their crimped hair. I also will say I don’t think their middle-aged selves are particularly different from their young teen selves at that point. But they were the first ones that taught me that I really was strong and during those years, I did make some wonderful friends I have to this day.

I never understood in the first place why the Lower Merion School District thought it was OK to turn on the cameras. I mean if other Apple products like your phone can be located via a find my phone app, why couldn’t something like that have been used as extra security? Why the cameras? How would turning on a camera tell them where a lost laptop actually was? Did they think it was going to give a screenshot of a street name?

And what happened to all the thousands of images that existed but disappeared? It is still seriously like they were stalking their own student body? Kids who never did anything wrong were deeply affected, and on certain levels permanently affected by this.

Other things I find astounding are the people still employed by Lower Merion School District who were part of this scandal and debacle who continued with employment by the district after this, some of whom are still employed today by the district? After this went down and the settlements were paid out these people should’ve no longer been working for the school district, yet there they are.

I will admit I was not only sad at the end of this, but I had many mixed emotions watching the entire four parts of the documentary series. Public schools are supposed to look out for the greater good of the students, but are they really doing that any longer, or is it just one big exercise in cover their ass which is kind of what I think happened here in the end.

If you get Amazon Prime I hope you take the time to stream Spy High. And to Lower Merion School District I simply ask what’s it like having the cameras turned on you?

OK, I am going to give you links to some of the past articles on this as well as the current coverage.

Thanks for stopping by.

https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/#

https://deadline.com/2025/01/spy-high-docuseries-blake-robbins-lawsuit-ordered-prime-video-mark-wahlberg-1236265186/

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/spy-high-tv-review-2025

Director Jody McVeigh-Schultz investigates school espionage for Spy High

https://www.technadu.com/spy-high-all-you-need-to-know-about-the-explosive-docuseries-based-on-a-real-life-surveillance-scandal/583835/

https://people.com/spy-high-docuseries-inside-teen-webcam-surveillance-case-11701579

Parents file civil-rights suit vs. Lower Merion School District

Four-part series on Lower Merion spycam case to premiere next month

Privacy issue goes public as vice principal, student speak

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/610k-settlement-in-school-webcam-spy-case/

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/education/20100504_Web_cam_report_blasts_Lower_Merion_school_district.html

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/year-in-review/20101012_Lower_Merion_district_s_laptop_saga_ends_with__610_000_settlement.html

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news20100416_1_000s_of_Web_cam_images__suit_says.html

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/breaking/20100419_Lower_Merion_details_Web_cam_scope.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/20/us-school-accused-laptops-spying

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/19/laptop.suit/index.html

More details emerge in Lower Merion School District webcam case

https://www.cato.org/blog/how-broadly-did-school-laptops-spy

https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/USA/2010/0219/Teen-says-school-spied-on-him-at-home-via-school-issued-laptop

School district admits to taking 56,000 laptop photos

https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2010/04/philadelphia-area_school_distr_1.html

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/nation_world/20100225_Laptop_family_is_no_stranger_to_legal_disputes.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8523807.stm

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/filing_school_district_spied_on_1000s_of_students_at_home_via_laptop_webcam

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/kILo80KUhg

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/02/school_laptop_spying_case_prob.html

Lower Merion School District Sued For Spying On Students Via Webcams In School-Issued Laptops

evil spying laptops: when something a community lived through becomes a docuseries

Posted on January 28, 2025 by carla

Never underestimate the power of community. A friend sent me an article this morning. Evil spying laptops that happened in Lower Merion Township is a docuseries.

To me? Oh how cool- the person (can’t remember their name) scouting for this initially contacted me because I blogged about it back then under Save Ardmore Coalition about evil spying laptops, I connected him to a friend from LMVUE who connected them to other people a while back and the end result? This. Never knew it would be Mark Waglburg thing. Yes he’s behind the series.

My friends and I always had the opinion that the kids in the case weren’t the only ones who had it happen to them, we always thought there were many more kids but these were the ones whose parents came forward. After all there were thousands of photos.

However, one kid’s parents’ issues became part of what was the story of this case. What the kid went through should never be diminished because of the actions of the adults in his life at the time.

I can tell you that this docuseries coming out is going to be very hard on the people who had to live it, but I am hoping that because Mark Wahlberg is behind it that it will be a story told the right way.

I was not part of the interviewing process for this docuseries because I told the person who initially contacted me that it wasn’t my story to tell because at the time I didn’t have kids in the school district, I was just writing about it as an issue locally. I was a community activist and a blogger there before I moved out here And became the blogger that everybody likes to complain about. But when it came to that, I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to speak about it. The people to speak about it are most appropriately the people that truly lived it not just people like me who observed it happening in the community.

But the thing is when people tell their story sometimes something good will happen and I’m hoping something good will happen here because if people see this, maybe it will be stopped in all the other places it’s still happening.

For those of us who lived through this back then either as a parent of a directly affected child or just as a community member thinking how could a school district be violating rights like this, it changed out we looked at computers. I don’t think any of us will ever have a camera on a laptop or a desktop that doesn’t have a cover over it, even if it is just a post it note.

And I will also note that I felt back then there was a very racial component to this whole thing as well, and I hope that the series covers that. Again, when I was initially contacted about this, I sent them to LMVUE people not the Robbins family whom I did not ever know.

Deadline: ‘Spy High’ Docuseries From EP Mark Wahlberg Lands At Prime Video

By Katie Campione

Philadelphia Inquirer: Lower Merion’s notorious ‘WebcamGate’ scandal to become an Amazon docuseries Mark Wahlberg is executive producing ‘Spy High,’ a four-part series premiering this Spring. by Rosa Cartagena Published Jan. 27, 2025, 3:05 p.m.

Please note that although the Inquirer characterizes this as a “dark period” in Lower Merion School District history, it’s hardly been the only dark period in this screwy school district.

LMVUE (Lower Merion Voices United for Equity in Education) which was also integral to this was a group of residents and parents who deserve a lot of credit here. They went against the school district initially for redistricting, and they did a lot of other things to help parents and students in the district, including having a big voice here with evil spying laptops.

I know when it comes to this, that a lot of people are upset that this one family seems central to perhaps even this docuseries – but again even if the parents were slightly less than did, the kids deserve laptops spying on them? No, they did not. So whatever the motivation was that caused these parents to become a lead in this and a face in this, perhaps if they hadn’t been so vocal, would this have gotten so far? It’s a double edge sword isn’t it? And I do think that if they hadn’t been so out in front on this, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten so much attention.

However, I wonder if it will go into one of the other characters who were there when this happened? And one person is the guy who parents wanted out in Wallingford Swarthmore school district correct?

But to people out there who think they can’t make a difference in their community, it can happen.

And we never referred to it as WebCamgate, it was always evil spying laptops.

Thanks for stopping by and see articles linked below.

Philadelphia Inquirer: