The deal will pay Robbins $175,000, most placed in trust until he turns 18. He'll get a slice - $25,000 - that he said he would spend on "some nice used car."
If Robbins was relieved or elated, he hid it well. In a brief phone interview Tuesday, he spoke in the monosyllabic tones of a teenager who had long since moved on from his 15 minutes of fame.
"It's not my whole life," he said. "It's just a part of it."
The settlement was one of two approved Monday night by a Lower Merion school board hoping to end the furor over an ill-starred program for tracking school-issued laptops.
Jalil Hasan, who graduated from Lower Merion High School in June, is to get $10,000 to settle a similar claim. And the district will pay the $425,000 legal fees of Mark Haltzman, who represented both students and helped draft an injunction covering all students.
U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois could formally approve the settlements Wednesday. On Tuesday, the judge signed the permanent injunction barring Lower Merion from tracking laptops without consent from students and their parents.
Together, the steps appeared to end a case that catapulted the Robbinses and the district into the spotlight and stirred debate about the use of technology in schools.
Robbins' suit, filed in February, claimed school employees secretly snapped hundreds of webcam photos of him last fall. School officials denied any spying, but later acknowledged flaws in the planning and oversight of the system they used for two years to track missing computers.
Both sides had talked of resolving the case before this school year began. Those hopes melted as acrimony rose. After months of tongue-biting restraint, the board and its lawyers in August filed a 46-page brief that challenged Haltzman's fees and accused the Robbinses of being more interested in a payout than privacy concerns.
