http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib ... acker.htmlHigh-tech IDs keep eye on students
By Lisa Leff
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 10, 2005
SUTTER ? The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.
The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.
While similar devices are being tested at several schools in Japan so parents can know when their children arrive and leave, Brittan appears to be the first U.S. school district to embrace such a monitoring system.
Civil libertarians hope to keep it that way.
"If this school doesn't stand up, then other schools might adopt it," Nicole Ozer, a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, warned school board members at a meeting Tuesday night. "You might be a small community, but you are one of the first communities to use this technology."
The system was imposed, WITHOUT PARENTAL INPUT, by the school as a way to simplify attendance-taking and potentially reduce vandalism and improve student safety. Principal Earnie Graham hopes to add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books.
However, some parents see a system that monitors their children's movements on campus as something out of George Orwell, who wrote the novel "1984" about an intrusively bureaucratized state of the future.
[Very common at BM facilities where walky-talkies are used to report when a student leaves one destination and has arrived at the intended destination.]
"There is a way to make kids safer without making them feel like a piece of inventory," said Michael Cantrall, one of several parents who complained.
"Are we trying to bring them up with respect and trust, or tell them that you can't trust anyone, YOU ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE MONITORED, and SOMEONE IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE WATCHING YOU?"
Cantrall told his children, in the fifth and seventh grades, not to wear the badges. He also filed a protest letter with the board and alerted the ACLU.
Graham, who also is superintendent of the single-school district in Sutter County just north of Sacramento County, told the parents that their CHILDREN COULD BE DISCIPLINED FOR BOYCOTTING the badges and that he doesn't understand their concerns.
"Sometimes when you are on the cutting edge, you get caught," Graham said, recounting the angry phone calls and notes he has received from parents.
All students are required to wear identification cards around their necks with their picture, name and grade and a wireless transmitter that beams their ID number to a teacher's handheld computer when the child passes under an antenna posted above a classroom door.
Graham also asked to have a chip reader installed in locker room bathrooms to reduce vandalism, although that reader isn't functional yet. While he has ordered everyone on campus to wear the badges, he said only the seventh-and eighth-grade classrooms are being monitored.
In addition to the privacy concerns, parents are worried the information on and inside the badges could wind up in the wrong hands and endanger their children, and that radio frequency technology might carry health risks.
Graham has dismissed each objection, arguing the devices do not emit cancer-causing radioactivity, and only confirm each child is in his or her classroom, rather than track them around the school.
The 15-digit identification number that confirms attendance is encrypted, he said, and not linked to other personal information, such as an address or phone number.
This radio frequency ID technology was developed by InCom, which plans to promote it at a national convention of school administrators next month.
InCom has paid the school several thousand dollars for agreeing to the experiment, and has promised a royalty from each sale if the system takes off, said company co-founder Michael Dobson, a technology specialist in the town's high school.
Not everyone in this close-knit farming town northwest of Sacramento is against the system. Some said they welcomed the IDs as a security measure.
"This is not Mayberry. This is Sutter, Calif. Bad things can happen here," said one parent, Tim Crabtree.
