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That doesn't explain why they punished a student for "improper behavior at home". Clearly, his laptop was not stolen.

Clearly, it hadn't been stolen -- but had it been reported stolen? It's a classic method of keeping something you're supposed to return. In that case, their activating the webcam would be perfectly in line with the stated policy.

Point being, there's still a lot of information we don't yet have. The policy of remotely monitoring the webcams is stupid, but beyond that, we don't know the specifics of why this particular webcam was activated or what the "improper behavior" was, so we don't know how much additional stupid there might be.

It doesn't matter, they've already made the judgement that the schools property is more important than the privacy of children, because they were students.

They shouldn't have activated them once let alone 42 times.

The 42 times they were activated in case of stolen laptops are pretty clear cut, but there are apparently other times those cams were active as well, and there is pretty hard proof that this concerned laptops that were not stolen.