Lower Merion School District questions motives and fees in opposing motion

Thursday was the day the Lower Merion School District had to answer the lawyer who wants it to pay his firm more than $400,000 for forcing the elite suburban district to halt its webcam monitoring and otherwise safeguard students' privacy.

The district's reply: Go pound sand.

In a federal court filing, Lower Merion's lawyers argued that the request by Mark S. Haltzman was unjustified and thin on details, and "far exceeds the bounds of reasonableness."

In their 46-page answer, the lawyers also took a broader shot at the motives of Haltzman and his clients, Harriton High School student Blake Robbins and his parents. They questioned why the Robbinses waited three months to air their concerns about students' privacy - and did so "quite publicly" with a lawsuit - instead of approaching school officials when they first learned about the laptop tracking in November.

"Had they done so, they unquestionably would have accomplished, at less expense to taxpayers, the same result that their lawsuit immediately prompted," wrote the district's attorneys, led by Henry E. Hockeimer Jr.

Haltzman defended his petition Thursday. "The work done was necessary to fully understand the extent to which the privacy of LMSD students and their families were violated," he wrote in an e-mail. "It was because of all this work as reflected in the fee petition ... that the court found that there was 'good cause' for the entering of the various injunctions designed to protect LMSD students and their families."

The district's filing marked the latest salvo in an increasingly acrimonious and costly dispute. Through July, the fees amassed by both sides had topped $1.5 million.

The clash over fees was one reason U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois summoned Hockeimer and Haltzman into a closed-door conference two weeks ago. It failed to yield an agreement.

Haltzman also wants the lawsuit certified as a class action - ostensibly to protect thousands of Lower Merion students who take home the state-of-the-art laptops issued by their schools.

Still unresolved is the initial lawsuit, in which Robbins and his family say school officials invaded their privacy by surreptitiously snapping hundreds of laptop images, including webcam photos taken inside the Robbinses' Penn Valley home.

In July, Haltzman filed a similar suit on behalf of Jalil Hasan, one of about 40 students who were notified that district technicians had remotely activated the theft-tracking feature on their laptops.