Tracking a student body
School supplies: Lined paper, No. 2 pencils and radio-frequency tracking chips.
Until someone offers a valid reason to tag schoolchildren with tracking microchips, this technology is better left for finding Fido once he jumps the backyard fence.
A San Antonio, Texas, school district has embedded locator chips into student ID badges to better police hallways. It now faces a legal challenge by fundamentalist Christians on a religious ground (the chips and cards are a sacrilegious “mark of the beast”). The American Civil Liberties Union also objects out of privacy concerns.
November 29, 2012 - 8:11 AM
I take the point but when communities intent on saving money make high schools that contain 1500-2000 or so students, there has to be some mechanism for accounting for them besides paying people to monitor hallways, bathrooms, parking lots and the entire campus. I am not nearly as upset about this as some want us to be. I see a purpose and a need in many schools.
Sandi, one problem I see with this is the student “forgetting” their badge in home room, etc.
Compliance could be a problem.
I don’t doubt that it will be as inefficient and unreliable as any other system, I just see where the schools are coming from in trying it.
Very much aware of the “slippery slope” concern…and not meaning to denigrate the civil/personal/Constitutional concerns/rights of (especially public) “students” vesus citizens generally….the key issue to me is that (if) the technology is only used within the school “campus”/grounds, etc. And only during school hours.