This article was published in partnership with The Trace. Sign up for its newsletters here. With an infectious smile, 7-year-old Daniel Barden’s slow, steady drumbeat held together the fledgling family band. The quartet’s intimate performance had brought life to the Best Western hotel in Monticello, New York, where the Bardens gathered to celebrate a joyous milestone:...

After the police in more than a dozen South Carolina communities fielded calls last week alerting them to active school shootings, officers rushed to campuses where students and educators hid in fear for their lives. Ever since the mass school shooting in May at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school, families nationwide have been on high...

Updated, Oct. 4 The Vice Society ransomware gang reportedly published over the weekend a trove of sensitive student records from the Los Angeles school district. The data was posted to the gang’s dark-web “leak site,” after education leaders refused to pay — and at first even acknowledge — a ransom. Yet in a press conference...

The Trevor Project, a leading group combatting LGBTQ youth suicide, took money from Gaggle, whose online monitoring tool zeroes in on queer students.

As the shady ransomware gang Vice Society took credit for a hack that sent Los Angeles school officials scrambling last week, cybersecurity experts noticed something peculiar.  Vice Society, an “intrusion, exfiltration and extortion” group that experts believe is based in Russia, has become notorious for waging cyber warfare against K-12 schools, leveraging the theft of...

When Baltimore students sign into their school-issued laptops, the police log on, too. Since the pandemic began, Baltimore City Public Schools officials have tracked students’ online lives with GoGuardian, a digital surveillance tool that promises to identify youth at risk of harming themselves or others. When GoGuardian flags students, their online activities are shared automatically with school...

Embattled education technology vendor Illuminate Education has become the first-ever company to get booted from the Student Privacy Pledge, an unprecedented move that follows a massive data breach affecting millions of students and allegations the company misrepresented its security safeguards. The Future of Privacy Forum, which created the self-regulatory effort nearly a decade ago to...

When brothers Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers set out to film a documentary about the mental health struggles of American youth, they knew they were tackling a pervasive problem unspoken about for far too long. What they didn’t realize were the lessons they’d come to uncover about themselves. Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental...

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers, rest her back against the wall and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While...

This story is part of a series produced in partnership with The Guardian exploring the increasing role of artificial intelligence and surveillance in our everyday lives during the pandemic, including in schools. Fifteen-year-old Jordyne Lewis was stressed out. The high school sophomore from Harrisburg, North Carolina, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, never mind the uncertainty of living in a pandemic...