Five takeaways from Prime Video’s ‘Spy High,’ the documentary about Lower Merion School District’s Webcamgate scandal

Many people in Lower Merion may think they know what happened during the school district’s Webcamgate scandal — when students were secretly photographed through school-issued laptop webcams. But few likely know the full story.

Spy High, a four-episode docuseries streaming on Prime Video, is the first high-profile attempt to untangle the complex web of lawsuits, privacy violations, and accusations of illegal surveillance that roiled the Philadelphia suburb in 2010, after news broke that the school’s computers had secretly captured over 56,000 images of students in their homes.

The Lower Merion School District had issued 2,306 Apple MacBooks to students with security software. If school officials determined that the device was lost or stolen, they could remotely activate the software to track its location. This triggered webcams to capture photographs and screenshots of the laptop in 15-minute intervals.

A total of 36 laptops photographed the minors, and the majority of images were taken after any alleged student infraction was resolved because staffers often failed to shut off the tracking software.

Cheltenham-raised director Jody McVeigh-Schultz — backed by executive producer Mark Wahlberg’s company, Unrealistic Ideas — revisits one of the region’s most notorious chapters with a fresh, expanded perspective that offers important insights for viewers both familiar and new to the story.

Here are five takeaways.

The Robbins family was the first to sue Lower Merion School District after Harriton High School officials accused 15-year-old Blake of selling drugs. As evidence, they cited a photograph of him with a “pill” that was actually Mike and Ike candy.

“I had assumed that a friend took it through the camera and handed it to the school,” Holly Robbins said about the photograph, until she called his school counselor. “She said ‘I can’t tell you where it came from. However, I really think you should get a lawyer involved here.’”

The Robbinses, as Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Bill Bender describes in the series, were “more like a Delco family than a Main Line family.”

Blake Robbins’ parents — a litigious couple with mounds of debt — had not paid insurance fees that the school required for the device, which triggered the laptop tracking.

More than 400 photos were taken of Blake, many in his bedroom in various states of undress, including a particularly disturbing image of him sleeping. “That’s the ultimate big brother moment,” former Inquirer reporter and editor John Martin says in the series.

Robbins contends that he was labeled a bad teen because of his reputation for partying and smoking weed, which prompted school officials to allegedly spy on him.

“What did I do wrong? Did I take pics of a 15-year-old boy?” asks Robbins, now 31 and a Los Angeles resident, on-screen, wearing a thick chain and blazer while holding his small dog, Ozzy. The school district ultimately paid Robbins a $610,000 settlement; $425,000 went to Mark Haltzman, the family’s lawyer.

McVeigh-Schultz sets up the documentary to initially focus on the Robbinses, but widens his scope to portray an elite school community with a history of marginalizing Black students.

Its legal challenges include a 2011 lawsuit claiming Black students were disproportionately placed in special education classes and a 2008 redistricting battle that led parents to sue, alleging racial discrimination.

“They don’t think that we have the ability to move forward, or we don’t have the brains, only because of the color of your skin,” says Ardmore native June Coleman-Allen, the parent of one son placed in special ed and another son who was a victim of the webcam surveillance. “‘Oh Lower Merion’s the best school’ — sure, if they’re Caucasian, or whatever. Of course it’s probably the best school. It’s not for us.”

Multiple interviewees highlight Lower Merion’s larger problems of classism and institutionalized racism as crucial context.

The series makes the case that school administrators singled out students they deemed troublemakers and used the surveillance technology to keep an eye on their behavior outside of school.

Keron Williams, also 31, and a part-time DJ, one of Coleman-Allen’s sons, never spoke publicly about being one of the webcam scandal victims, until McVeigh-Schultz called.

A Boy Scout, skater, and honors student, Williams was shocked in 2009 when the Lower Merion High School principal told him a girl reported her bracelet and other belongings had been stolen and identified the culprit as an African American skateboarder with a black jacket.

The next day, they say, the green light on Williams’ school laptop flickered on, despite it never being reported lost or stolen.

“I am convinced 100% it was intentionally done,” says Coleman-Allen. They filed a Student Doe lawsuit against Lower Merion School District, hoping to shield Williams from public scrutiny. The school district initially insisted that Williams sign a nondisclosure agreement, which he refused, and eventually the school district paid a settlement of $13,500.

Sharing his story in Spy High was cathartic for Williams. “The documentary is the first time people had really known that I was involved in it, so it kind of came to a shock to everyone,” he told The Inquirer in an interview. “Finally being able to tell my story through Jody and his team, it felt peaceful to get that release and see people’s reactions and get validation.”

The Lower Merion School District hired the law firm Ballard Spahr to investigate, and its report — which several interviewees say is biased — found that school staff had been negligent in implementing the tracking software, but that there was no criminal intent to spy on students. The FBI also investigated, but those efforts yielded no charges against any school administrators or leaders, some of whom are still employed by the school district.

Spy High points to the lack of significant consequences as a major source of confusion. Questions still linger, especially around how the photographs were deleted and how it could be possible that none of them, according to the school district investigation, pictured explicit nudity.

The school district refused to participate in the docuseries and told McVeigh-Schultz that no staffers were interested in being interviewed.

“I understand why they feel like they don’t want to give this oxygen,” the director told The Inquirer. “Everyone in this story thought they were doing what was best for the students of Lower Merion, but obviously, I think there were a lot of unintended consequences that came out of mistakes made.”

Lower Merion’s Webcamgate was one of the earliest examples of school surveillance gone wrong — years before the pandemic pushed most schools into some form of online learning. Today, students across the country use school-issued devices that monitor their activity daily, creating countless opportunities for misuse or abuse.

Spy High‘s ending is set far away from Lower Merion, traveling to Minneapolis, where one school uses software to monitor Google chats and flag words related to death, weapons, and LGBTQ terms. One incident resulted in administrators alerting a parent to their child’s online conversations — which the student thought were private — and outing the student as gay in the process.

“That is what makes you step away from the series at the end [saying], ‘Oh, I need to be thinking about this if I have a kid going to school,’” said McVeigh-Schultz. “This is important to me, and it really is important to anybody, just because this kind of [surveillance] is so prevalent in all aspects of society.”

A parent himself based in Los Angeles, McVeigh-Schultz worries about the risks surrounding his 7-year-old’s school-issued iPad.