That’s what happened to 15-year-old Blake Robbins, who was accused by officials in Pennsylvania’s affluent Lower Merion School District of dealing drugs in 2009 after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in his hand. The moment was captured by the webcam on his school-issued laptop, one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. 

Robbins sued and the subsequent case, dubbed “WebcamGate,” is at the center of now streaming on Amazon Prime, that examines the high-profile student surveillance scandal and the explosion of student privacy threats that followed it.

The Lower Merion School District, which settled the class-action lawsuit, was an early adopter of one-to-one computer education technology programs that provide school-issued laptops to students. Such programs have since , particularly since the pandemic. So, too, have digital surveillance tools like Gaggle and GoGuardian, which alert educators when students express thoughts of self-harm or discuss topics deemed taboo, like sex, violence or drugs. 

Directed by Jody McVeigh-Schultz and executive produced by Mark Wahlberg, the documentary offers a cautionary tale about what happens when student monitoring initiatives — often intended to promote young people’s safety and well-being — go awry. It also explores how covert student surveillance intersects with far-reaching school equity issues involving race, disability, privilege and discipline. 

After years of reporting on digital student surveillance myself, I caught up last week with McVeigh-Schultz, whose other documentaries include about reality TV’s seemingly wholesome Duggar family and the Emmy-nominated which delves into the brutal 1960 killing of three women in an Illinois state park. We talked about what he wants viewers to take away from the Robbins’ scandal 15 years after it unfolded and the lessons it holds for contemporary student privacy debates and schools’ growing reliance on ed tech. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

What motivated you to take a deep dive into the Robbins case, and why is it important right now?

I grew up just outside of Philly in a suburb called Cheltenham and I had heard about this story. I knew Lower Merion as the high school that Kobe [Bryant] went to. That’s what it was famous for, but I knew about the Robbins story and I was like, “That’s crazy,” when I heard about it back in 2010 and then I kind of never heard anything more about it. It was a really big story and then just kind of went away. 

When we talked to folks from wealthy suburbs outside of Philadelphia, I think it’s very clear to me that one of the key indicators of status is education. It’s more important than anything else to people. 

The public schools in Lower Merion are really highly rated and people care a ton about the quality of the education and the image of the institution. What are the real world implications of that? 

In this case, the way it played out, some of the things that happened were counterintuitive. Many folks from that community didn’t want to see a lawsuit come to bear against their school. It was like, “Oh well, you know, this actually is perhaps going to affect our home values,” if you’re selling your home and the biggest selling point is the quality of the education.

That’s something that you wouldn’t expect to be one of the first reactions to finding out that the schools may be surveilling your kids. But it was, and the fact that the Robbins family had lived in the community for a long time but just weren’t considered part of the in-group just because of who they were was very interesting and, I think, led to people being skeptical of them.

The documentary leaves it up to you to decide whether that skepticism is deserved or not.

Absolutely. The documentary certainly highlights how people are complex and have complicated stories. What did you learn about debates over personal privacy, especially when it comes to information about children?

People’s expectations of how much privacy you should be afforded, and how much you should expect without having to ask any questions, those expectations vary a lot. 

Somebody who was interviewed in a news piece that ran in 2010 said, “You know, this is the school district’s laptop, they could tap in at any time and rightfully so.” I’m a parent, I have a 2-year-old and a 7-year-old who’s in first grade. To me, that seems a bit absurd, but the truth is, I think there are certain contexts where a school-issued laptop is going to be surveilled. We know it’s going to be surveilled, but we don’t expect that it will be able to take pictures in our kids’ bedrooms. 

To me it’s a matter of where are [the] spaces where we should reasonably expect privacy? Transparency is the most important aspect of all of this. Not only were there no conversations going on like, “Hey look, these laptops are going to be surveilled in a number of ways. You should not be leaving them open in your bedroom, You should not be going on any website you wouldn’t want your principal to also see.” The IT department specifically thought it would be a bad idea if parents and students were alerted to the existence of the software that could take images. They felt like, “Well then we won’t be able to recover the stolen laptop because people will just put tape over it.”

Well, that is their decision not to have images taken of them in their bedroom, right? One of the journalists we interviewed said it was like trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. This level of surveillance was not required to track inventory. It just wasn’t. 

Hindsight is 20/20 but it’s obvious from what transpired that they spent a lot more money on legal fees and settling these lawsuits than they ever saved by making sure a handful of laptops were not stolen or lost.

What did you learn about the motives of the school district officials, the lawyers and the families involved?

When I’m making a documentary I’m never thinking in terms of quote-unquote good guys and bad guys. Everyone in this story thought they were doing what was best for the students involved. But in the end, I think there was this balance of protecting students ‘ privacy and protecting the image of the school district. When a mistake is made, there is a reluctance to admit and take responsibility and accept blame. Once you do that, you are admitting to what happened and then there’s all these legal ramifications. 

Multiple people are like, you know, these kids need therapists, they need somebody to check on them and to be like, “Hey, your privacy was violated, are you doing OK?” and that did not happen.

I can’t say why that didn’t happen but to me it seems likely that part of not offering people help is that the minute you say this person needs a therapist because of what we did, you’re admitting to a pretty major violation. 

The documentary doesn’t focus just on the Robbins case. It offers a deep dive into education policy debates around racial inequities, school integration, gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. What did you find were the implications of surveillance for these populations? 

We talked to Elizabeth Laird at the Center for Democracy and Technology and one of the things she said she sees all the time is that when surveillance is ubiquitous and regularly used in education, vulnerable populations end up feeling the brunt of the negative repercussions. 

In this case, back in 2010, people discovered that a disproportionate amount of the students that were surveilled were African American. There was a sense that if this technology was being misused to discipline students or to check up on students then the chances are it was going to be misused for somebody that was a student of color. 

When we started talking to students of color who had their images taken, we started to understand, “Oh, there is this whole context to what they’re experiencing.” Somebody said you can’t understand the laptop issue without understanding all these other battles that were happening at the time. There was a history of an achievement gap there and African-American parents felt like if you wanted to get an equal education for your kids, you had to fight for it. In this context, there was a real lack of trust of the school district by African-American parents. 

Keron Williams and his mother really wanted to tell his story. It was a story of somebody suspecting him of stealing a bracelet and him being brought into the principal’s office. He says his laptop webcam was activated a couple days later after they searched his pockets and found nothing but a Boy Scouts handkerchief. 

There’s racial profiling but also this idea of the misuse of technology meant to keep laptops from being stolen. If something like this is misused, vulnerable populations are going to feel the brunt of it more. 

That brings me to one of the other stories we talked about, which was more recent. 

In 2020, with the pandemic, school-issued devices and remote learning became the norm. We talked to two students who started high school online, went to classes on Zoom, and they were using their school-issued laptops for everything. 

The way they communicated instead of seeing their friends at lunch was through a Google Hangouts chat. What they didn’t realize was their school was using monitoring software that essentially scooped up everything they wrote while logged into their school account, including private chats. They were brought to the principal’s office and were confronted with what they wrote. 

The context of it is that the school decided it was bullying. What we reveal is that they were using the word “gay” because they were. The term they used was “we’re a pretty gay friend group. Gay was a descriptor to us.”

One of these kids had to come out in the principal’s office with his father there. Luckily his parents were pretty great about it, but that’s a really awful position to put a kid in and, you know, again, a vulnerable population bearing the brunt of overzealous surveillance. 

The goal of this surveillance is to protect kids, it’s to make sure kids aren’t hurting themselves, hurting other students. There’s obviously a mental health crisis going on in terms of high school-aged kids, but there really has to be a discussion about whether these tactics are making the mental health crisis better or worse. 

You’re talking about the tools that schools nationally have increasingly used to collect and analyze reams of information about students in the name of keeping them safe. This includes tools like Gaggle and GoGuardian. Given the growth in these tools, do any guardrails need to be put in place? 

First of all, it’s so important that students know what is being used to surveil any device they’re using. The fact that kids hadn’t heard of Gaggle is really a problem. 

But if they know about it, that doesn’t solve all the problems because what you’re asking high schoolers especially to do is to find their own voice, understand how to freely express themselves, to be vulnerable. In some of my best creative writing courses my teachers were saying, “Look, if it scares you to write this, you’re probably going in the right direction.” 

The minute a kid realizes, “Well, everything that I’m writing in a creative writing class — a poem, a personal essay — is going through this software, maybe going to my principal, maybe going to law enforcement,” they’re going to express themselves differently. That’s just a really dangerous road to go down.

Students and parents have to be aware, but also I just think it should be less powerful. I don’t think we should be able to say there are no ways in which you can use our technology, which is kind of unavoidable if you’re a high school student, without being constantly surveilled.

In Minnesota, the story we cover, they . That’s a pretty huge step, and I think that’ll happen more and more as people become more aware of this stuff. 

 There are just places where we should not be allowing this.

Directed by New York Times bestselling author Laura Morton and Oscar-winner Vanessa Roth, Anxious Nation earned rave reviews during its film festival run. The filmmakers have now announced that the feature will stream free as a resource several days next week: “The film is dedicated to harnessing anxious energy for good, and is essential viewing for anyone struggling with anxiety.” 

Anyone visiting can now RSVP for the free streaming link, which will remain active Oct. 24-26. (Learn more about the campaign at the film’s and )

Earlier this summer, 74 reporter Marianna McMurdock published a profile of the project:Ěý

A teenage girl has trouble breathing at her kitchen table, in the midst of a panic attack. 

Through tears, her mother coaches her to make eye contact and regulate breathing.  

Along with artwork and snippets of therapy sessions, the scene is one of many in the new documentary that paints an intimate portrait of families experiencing the youth mental health crisis firsthand.

Created by Oscar-winning documentary director Vanessa Roth and entrepreneur and author Laura Morton, Anxious Nation invites audiences into the world of several young people managing anxiety, OCD, suicidal ideation and depression. Their experiences are interspersed with reflections from a psychotherapist and advocates including Taraji P. Henson.

After a nearly year-long run at regional film festivals across the country , the film is now being brought to select cinemas, high school and college campuses to jumpstart conversations about managing generalized anxiety disorder — top of mind for families now more than ever in recent history. (Read the full profile)

Get the latest news and updates about student mental health delivered directly to your inbox; sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s daily newsletter.

Through tears, her mother coaches her to make eye contact and regulate breathing.  

Along with artwork and snippets of therapy sessions, the scene is one of many in the new documentary , now available to stream on , Apple TV, Prime Video and Google Play for $5-12, that paints an intimate portrait of families experiencing the youth mental health crisis firsthand.

Created by Oscar-winning documentary director Vanessa Roth and entrepreneur and author Laura Morton, Anxious Nation invites audiences into the world of several young people managing anxiety, OCD, suicidal ideation and depression. Their experiences are interspersed with reflections from a psychotherapist and advocates including Taraji P. Henson.

After a nearly year-long run at regional film festivals across the country , the film is now being brought to select cinemas, high school and college campuses to jumpstart conversations about managing generalized anxiety disorder — top of mind for families now more than ever in recent history. 

Anxious Nation has generated a multi-generational response, with many grandparents attending screenings and sharing letters to the director and cast. Some say the film helped them understand that anxiety is real, or encouraged them to talk to their grandchildren in ways they didn’t before. 

Sevey Morton, the teen from the kitchen table and daughter of filmmaker Laura Morton, said the film helped her find coping strategies through others’ stories. And while initially hesitant to give her permission to use the scene, she now sees the representation as necessary. 

“I remembered what it felt like at my age to be struggling with that and feeling like I was the only person,” Sevey said. “If I can be that person that girls and boys can relate to with mental health and the struggles then that’s worth it … I feel like it’s so needed, I haven’t seen any footage like that or anyone being vulnerable like that on camera.”

“I would have killed to see someone like me who was in a film similar to this, speaking truthfully about their mental health,” she added. 

Rather than having experts to explain anxiety’s history or a mythical solution, filmmakers intentionally centered childrens’ point of view, through reflections, artwork, and vulnerable at-home video of moments previously only experienced by themselves, their parents or mental health providers.

In frank interviews, teens lay out how anxiety has impacted their relationships — to romantic partners, parents, school and even faith communities. 

“Teenagers really are asking to be seen and heard. We, teachers, community members, whether we think something should make them feel anxious or not, or whether we think we know how they should deal with it, doesn’t matter,” said Roth. “We actually need to start from where they are.”

New Hampshire’s Winnacunnet Public Schools Superintendent Meredith Nadeau said Anxious Nation helped their schools begin conversations and be more empathetic about mental health. 

“The film helps to normalize the experience of anxiety in children and adolescents, and, I think, has helped people to better understand what a young person with anxiety might be experiencing,” Nadeau told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ by email. 

While the youth in Anxious Nation range in age, race and geography, all have had professional support with their anxiety disorders. Many children currently living with anxiety have not yet had consistent access to that level of care. 

“There’s a whole other realm of students and children that we work with that are lacking resources and lacking parent reflection and lacking the ability to articulate what’s happening,” said Heather Cronan, director of school counseling at Winnacunnet High School.

Still, Cronan hopes to one day be able to screen parts of the film in health classes, as it can help jumpstart talks about mental health and family dynamics — something she often sees left out of the conversation. 

The documentary doesn’t shy away from the role parents, caregivers, and the family environment play on children with anxiety. 

In some scenes, parents’ own anxieties about success trigger childrens’ fears and feelings of inadequacy.

“We look at the person suffering, and so rarely do we look at what role and contribution parents have in all of it, whether it’s nurture or nature or both,” said Laura Morton. 

Lynn Lyons, a psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety disorders, also likens anxiety to a “cult leader” that dictates what families can and cannot do. 

The metaphor, she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, has been helpful for parents to get distance from the day-day interactions with anxiety. Thinking of anxiety as separate from the child can also remove some blame and shame. 

For instance, one young boy had severe anxiety about attending school. The father found himself “following the cult leader” by attending class with his son, offering constant comfort. This solution, though it felt necessary short-term, was not sustainable and did not help his son develop tools to manage anxiety. 

“We can say, look how powerful this anxiety is … Look how much it impacts your decisions. And we have this common goal, of not letting the cult leader be in charge,” she said. 

Lyons and other experts recommend that children with anxiety develop a toolkit. For Sevey, journaling and grounding exercises have helped with catastrophic thinking. 

“Whenever I get anxious, I really spiral and I think that it’s going to last forever,” Sevey said. “So a way to ground myself is I think about how long is it gonna last? Like, is it gonna matter in five minutes? Yes. Is it gonna matter in five hours, five days, five weeks, five months, five years?” 

Others in the film find relief in a combination of skateboarding, basketball, therapy, socializing and breathing exercises. 

“We might not be able to address the nature of a person that comes into the world,” Roth said, “but we certainly as a society can do better at [nurturing].” 

Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, a two-part documentary that premieres Monday on PBS, presents the raw accounts of nearly two dozen young people from diverse backgrounds who open up about their excruciating life experiences. Through varied stories that touch on issues like abuse, addiction and discrimination, the Ewers hope their film will give their audience an understanding that they came to themselves: Everybody, no matter their backgrounds, is affected by America’s mental health crisis in one way or another. 

The film, executive produced by renowned documentarian Ken Burns, was screened at the White House Thursday, with First Lady Jill Biden saying, “We have so much work to do to help our children heal,” and thanking the filmmakers for shining a light on mental health.

“It’s impossible not to be moved by the pain that these young people and their families share,” she said. “But there was so much hope there, too. Because they had all found a way from that darkness towards the light.” 

The documentary can be seen at 9 p.m. ET on Monday and Tuesday and will be available on PBS stations nationally, PBS.com and the . It is part of , called Well Beings, to raise awareness about mental health issues. 

“The goal of the film, we hope, is that people will find relatability in their own lives through these kids’ stories,” Christopher, who co-directed the documentary with his brother, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “I felt connected in ways that I can’t even describe to each and every person’s story. Some of them nearly destroyed me as we were filming their interviews because they hit so close to home.”

The young people featured in it range in age from 11 to 27, including a teenager who lost the fight against addiction at the age of 15, a young Native American woman who felt so isolated that she contemplated suicide and a high school freshman who experienced a series of assaults that led to troubling hallucinations. Among them is Billie, a 15-year-old from a rural farming community who endured intense bullying for being transgender. For 14-year-old Xavier, trauma stemmed from an abusive father. 

“Cigarette smoke is a very triggering thing from my past since I associate that with getting beat by wooden sticks,” said Xavier, who recalled getting beaten “for seemingly no reason.”

begin by the age of 14 and 75% occur by age 24, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. 

“The things my ancestors went through, it’s shown through alcohol abuse, addictions, non-stable families, toxic relationships,” explains Alexis, a 21-year-old who grew up on a Native American reservation. “That’s the burden that Indigenous youth deal with everyday, you’re just born into it.” 

New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data offer bleak insight into the extent of the problem and how the pandemic has made the crisis even worse for millions of teens, especially LGBTQ youth and girls. In a recent CDC survey, more than a third of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, nearly 20% reported that they seriously considered dying by suicide and a staggering 9% had actually tried. Even before the pandemic, suicide was a leading cause of death among teens as rates of youth anxiety and depression surged. In 2009, a quarter of high school students reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness. By 2019, that rate jumped to nearly 37%. 

Though the project has been years in the making, the film acknowledges how the pandemic has made the crises far more urgent. The Ewers are longtime collaborators with Ken Burns and the trio will continue working together to create a series of films examining the mental health crisis in America.

Over the course of four hours, this first film takes viewers on a journey that for many began with traumatic experiences that led to debilitating mental health struggles, but ended with a message of hope. Despite roadblocks including homelessness, arrests, addictions, eating disorders and suicide attempts, many of the young subjects were able to go on and live happy lives thanks to mental health care and the coping skills they developed.

Yet recovery is a lifelong process. It’s a lesson that Erik learned firsthand over the course of filming the documentary, he said. Throughout his entire life, he struggled to understand his emotional issues. Although his parents took him to a psychiatrist while he was in elementary school, it wasn’t until he started filming the documentary that he began to truly address his challenges. The youth in his film, he said, “gave me an education about myself.”

“If the film has the power to do that for me, I can only hope that it will have that power for other people as well,” he said. 

Christopher said the youth interviews hit home for his family, too, as his daughter struggled with mental health challenges of her own. Listening to each of the stories, he said, “gave us the courage and the commitment to see through the proper care for our daughter.” 

As the filmmakers weave the young peoples’ individual stories into a cohesive narrative, the result can only be described as a gut punch. With the goal of presenting an unvarnished look into the pervasiveness of youth mental health crises, the documentary is difficult to watch at times. But sugarcoating the issue would be a disservice to those who are struggling, Erik said. 

“Imagine a kid out there who is literally watching it and we watered it down, which of course, we had not,” he said. “But if they did, they’d be saying ‘Wow, I’m a lot worse than I thought,’ or say ‘This is bullshit.’”

The stigma still associated with mental health issues prevents many young people from sharing their experiences, yet the Ewers brothers said their subjects were motivated to open up on film — and wound up feeling better as a result. They were tired of keeping their suffering bottled up inside and hoped that greater awareness could save lives. 

Alexis, who grew up on the reservation, said that nearly all Indigenous youth are the victims of trauma and abuse to some degree. Yet also embedded in her DNA, she said, is resilience. 

“I know for a fact that my ancestors and my elders, they’re rooting for me and they want me to do good,” she said. “I’ll share my story over and over again. I’ll go through those emotions like a million times if it helps one person.”