Season 18

16 episodes · 1999

Conyers, Georgia is a prosperous bedroom community just outside Atlanta. FRONTLINE examines the link between an outbreak of syphilis among a group of its teenagers and the well-off community in which they live. The film reveals a parent's worst nightmare--children as young as fourteen naming scores of sexual partners; others telling of binge drinking, drugs and sex parties. In a series of intertwining profiles, FRONTLINE uncovers the roots of the Conyers syphilis epidemic and reveals the turbulent psychology of America's suburban teenagers.

FRONTLINE explores what led Kip Kinkel, a 15-year-old Oregon boy, to kill his parents and two classmates, and shoot and injure 25 others at his high school.

In "Jefferson's Blood," FRONTLINE correspondent Shelby Steele and producer Tom Lennon re-examine Jefferson's life, and piece together the little that can be known about Sally Hemings. Steele and Lennon also explore the repercussions of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship for the couple's modern-day descendants, many of whom are still attempting to find their place along America's blurred color line. "[Jefferson] spawned two lines of descendants--one legitimate, one not," Steele says in the documentary. "And this bastardized part of his family would be driven by a sense of incompleteness."

During the election year of 2000, George Bush and Al Gore battled over issues regarding education. This program explores the heated political debate over the reform of public education and investigates the spectrum of "school choice" options, from vouchers to charter schools to for-profit academies