Parents In Support of the Lower Merion School District

56,000 is a big number, which is why it happens to be in the title of the latest Philadelphia Inquirer piece on the use of the recovery feature in LMSD. A few facts are mentioned but there is no accompanying clarification of the way in which those facts affect the in/significance of the number in the title, so here it is.First, that the webcams took a picture every 15 minutes. Let us crunch some numbers. That means, in a single day, on a single computer, 96 images would be captured. For 42 missing laptops, that would be 4032 for one day of use. If each laptop was monitored for an equal length of time, that would be a total of 13 days during which the feature was activated for those 42 computers. Given the information contained in this article, all but 17,500 images were associated with six laptops at Harriton, images that were stored until police charged the suspect with theft. According to the article, "the next biggest chunk of images stem from the five or so laptops where...

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This is an update on the issue at hand. Today, LMSDParents.org filed a Motion to Intervene in the Robbins v. LMSD suit. The motion, filed on behalf of three parents of high school student sin the LMSD, will effectively secure several things we all want, as parents, including:1. Ensuring our students' right to privacy2. A thorough investigation3. Sunshine - where all the facts are made public. You can read the entire text on the other petition site, www.LMSDParents.org and you can read the full motion at the Pacer website.I am glad that we are moving forward on this issue by taking control over the situation ourselves rather than leaving it to the discretion of a lawyer we did not hire. There will always be people who wish to resolve things differently, and whose voices though small in number make more noise than the silent majority, but that does not mean that things have to stay that way. So I urge you via this post as I will do in a personal email to each of you, to forward this...

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It seems that the combined force of 778 parents signing our ipetition in support of the school district and over 500 supporting the opt-out effort of LMSDparents.org, the Robbins family and their lawyer have decided that their intention was just the obtaining of information and change in policy, not costly litigation. Filing a lawsuit is an odd way to go about getting the former and avoiding the latter, but to each his own. I am simply glad to be a part of an effort that united rather than divided people. The parents who have been willing to step up and be counted deserve to be commended for their ability to trust in conversation and community efforts rather than name-calling and lawsuits. I hope that LMSDparents.org is sustained after this issue has ended, as a group that can be counted on to come together across the ordinary class and geographic divides to advocate on behalf of the people at the heart of the district: our children. Ru Freeman

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Hi Everybody - This is a note to those of you who are parents of current high-school students, or high school students who were at either Lower Merion or Harriton during 2009, to please log on to www.lmsdparents.org to read updated information about our joint efforts to counter the class-action suit that is being brought against the district, and to which some of us are a part whether or not we wish to be.  There will be a meeting on Tuesday, March 2nd, from 7-9pm at a location that will be announced on the website and here. This meeting is specifically for those parents who are included in the "class" definition as specified in the lawsuit, i.e. parents of LMSD students who have been issued a laptop equipped with a webcam. It is important to attend this meeting so you may gather information pertinent to the case as well as to your role in it, and to sign the petition - which includes a confirmation page - so that we can present our side of the case. It is also important to...

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For those of you who have not yet joined the Facebook group, Reasonable LMSD Parents Refusing to Rush to Judgment, it is a good place to talk with other parents in the district about this issue. The group is administered by LMSD parents Mary Cooper Butler, Mary Toole-Ebbert and Mary Walsh. My article about the issue is up on CommonDreams today (The Ignorant Righteous v. the LMSD : the Rush to Judgment) and attracting lots of hate-mail. No surprise. Do join your voices to the discussion if at all possible - the more we speak out publicly, the more convincing we can be. Several of you have already done so - many thanks! There are several articles in today's local papers that bring up two things: the Robbins case and the redistricting case. With regard to the latter, if you actually read the details of the released files, there is no evidence that race was part of the decision for the redistricting rule, except to the extent that it was brought up along with every other pertinent fact...

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We have gone from 16 signatures yesterday morning, four of which belonged to the people who first dicussed starting this petition, to 444 before noon today. The signatures belong to parents from all the schools, in both halves of the district. It is remarkably uplifting to realize that, redistricting notwithstanding, we all share the same values and assume the same responsibilities with regard to educating our kids. An article I wrote about this issue will be on commondreams.org either today or tomorrow and I will post the link in the sidebar of the main petition page. Please add your comments to that to give our voices a little more reach. We have also been contacted by the media and have the opportunity to add our perspective to the stories they are writing. Thank you to all of you who continue to spread the word. Please ignore the people who want to dredge up old stuff and add vitriol and bile to what is meant to be something positive. The true test of their idiocy is that their...

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One of the signatories to this petition alerted me to the fact that she received a request for a donation. I want to assure everybody that there is no request for any donations on our part. If such a request was made it was proabably from ipetitions, the site that hosts these sorts of petitions without cost. Furthermore, your email addresses will not be used for any purpose whatsoever beyond the simple gathering of our collective signatures of support. If anything needs to be communicated, it will be done via the blog on this site. With regard to the blog, please send me any post that you might wish to add to this and I will upload it for you so long as it is respectfully worded and serves the purpose of creating a unifying voice among us parents from all the schools in this district.  All best, ru.

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When we rush to file a lawsuit before contacting administrators with our problems, or, if we live in fear of lawsuits, trust is the first thing that is compromised. I am posting a section of the Philadelphia Inquirer article from today which speaks about the Federal gag order against the School District which prevents the Superintendent from speaking about this issue even at the town hall meeting being held today in Narberth. "The next time Lower Merion school administrators want to talk to students and parents about their laptop-camera controversy, they will have to get a lawyer's blessing. Not from their own lawyers, but the ones suing them on behalf of a Harriton High sophomore who claims the school invaded his home and his privacy by remotely snapping his image with the camera on his school-provided laptop. The unusual order, signed by a federal judge yesterday, means those running the elite Lower Merion School District can't say a word about the laptop cameras or any...

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Thank you to all of you who have signed the petition thus far. It is being passed on by word of mouth. The site allows you to forward it to up to five friends at a time, so if you have more than that, please return to the site and forward it to others. You can also cut/paste the link into the body of an email and send it out that way. I am listening to NPR right now and they will be talking about this issue within this half hour. Please listen and call in if you can to make a respectful and clear statement of support for our school district. Some talking points:That there was a rush to litigation without any contact of school authorities before. That all students were aware of the web cam feature; the failure was in not having them sign a statement accepting its inclusion on their laptops. That there is a lot of background information regarding the parties to this lawsuit that the media continues to overlook as they rush to vilify a school district that is recognized nationally as...

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As we discussed the events of this past week, we decided that it was necessary to indicate that there are two sides to the response, the one that has been covered by the media - and, now, defended by the ACLU - and the other that is saner and more measured. We believe that there is a responsibility on our parts, as parents, to work with school administrators to find solutions to problems, that not every unpleasantness necessitates a lawsuit and, more than all of this, that our students are admirably served by our school system and we do not wish to see it tarnished, or its work diminished, as a result of the actions of a very small subset of students/parents. In the long run, such disfigurement of our school district affects our children negatively: it lowers morale, leads to misunderstandings between students and school officials and teachers, and eventually affects their productivity. It also reduces the national stature of our schools. It is important that we parents who realize...

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