I've heard police suggest that credit for good conduct time should begin to accrue at birth, but never this ...
Radio-controlled tracking system upsets parents

SUTTER, Calif. - 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 eventually add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books.

But some parents see a system that can monitor their children's movements on campus as something straight out of Orwell.

"There is a way to make kids safer without making them feel like a piece of inventory," said Michael Cantrall, one of several angry 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 said he 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 serves as the superintendent of the single-school district, told the parents that their children could be disciplined for boycotting the badges - and that he doesn't understand what all their angst is about.

"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.

Each student is 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 is not functional yet. And while he has ordered everyone on campus to wear the badges, he said only the seventh and eighth grade classrooms are being monitored thus far.

In addition to the privacy concerns, parents are worried that 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 dismisses each objection, arguing that the devices do not emit any cancer-causing radioactivity, and that for now, they merely confirm that each child is in his or her classroom, rather than track them around the school like a global-positioning device.

The 15-digit ID number that confirms attendance is encrypted, he said, and not linked to other personal information such as an address or telephone number.

What's more, he says that it is within his power to set rules that promote a positive school environment: If he thinks ID badges will improve things, he says, then badges there will be.

"You know what it comes down to? I believe junior high students want to be stylish. This is not stylish," he said.

This latest adaptation of radio frequency ID technology was developed by InCom Corp., a local company co-founded by the parent of a former Brittan student, and some parents are suspicious about the financial relationship between the school and the company. InCom 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 the company's co-founder, Michael Dobson, who works as a technology specialist in the town's high school. Brittan's technology aide also works part-time for InCom.

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, California. Bad things can happen here," said Tim Crabtree, an area parent.

Well, this certainly is a sign of the times. The students have no right to privacy in public, and the school is a public place. The school says that they just want to monitor attendance? Well, manys the time I've heard a teacher lament that the 3 minutes spent on taking accurate attendance detracts from the TAKS (sp?) lessons that they must give so their student can pass to the next grade.

If you take attendance by radio, can we cut out the teacher all together. Live video feed by one teacher, piped into every, say 10th grade Endlish classroom, with real time interactive video, WOW - that would really reduce the costs of education.

This is just the tip of the iceburg.

I don't know. I'm a little more concerned about my kids safety than I am her privacy. I could care less about attendeance but I like knowing the school can verify she is in a class. I bought my 11 year old a cell phone this year, somethin I swore I wouldn't do. One of the determining factors of getting one for her this early was the GPS in the phone. I even instructed her that if anything ever happened, make sure she kept the phone on her person and hidden.

I wonder whether the parents who are so interested in preserving their children's privacy have any notion at all what their children actually do in private.

I'm a little confused as to what the objection is: it's OK for the teachers to manually count attendance and require the students to be in particular places at particular times, but it's not OK to handle that with a computer? It's OK for the school to require that a child get permission from the teacher to leave and go to the restroom, but it's not OK to make sure that's where he goes? It's OK to put cameras in the school that will show who goes in and out of the locker room (which any passerby could see anyway) but not to use a computer to note the same thing?

What exactly is the downside? That kids will think they are " a piece of inventory "? I suppose we want to make sure and put that off until they get old enough to get a job or go to college and use timecards and ID badges and cardkeys.