Fascinating article in the LA Times about a town that's riled parents and students alike with some new technologies:
This little Northern California farm town is blissfully unaccustomed to turmoil. But recent weeks dished up a hopper of dissent. It started with a girl who went home from junior high saying she felt like an orange.
Lauren Tatro, 13, told her parents the plain facts. Every student at Brittan Elementary School had to wear a badge the size of an index card with their name, grade, photo — and a tiny radio identification tag. The purpose was to test a new high-tech attendance system. To the eighth-grader, it seemed students had been turned into grocery items on the shelf, slabs of sirloin at the meat counter, fruit in the produce section...
Known as radio frequency identification, RFID for short, the technology has been around for decades. But only lately have big markets blossomed. Radio identification has been embraced by manufacturers and retailers to track inventory, deployed on bridges to automatically collect tolls and used on ranches to cull cattle. The microchips have been injected into pets.
But applying that technology in conjunction with people prompts an outcry from civil libertarians and privacy advocates...Add schoolchildren to the list...
Earnie Graham, principal and superintendent of the one-school district, is a self-described "tech guy." He liked the badge idea because it would streamline the taking of attendance, giving teachers a few minutes more each day to teach and boost accuracy, no small matter given that California school funding is based on how many children attend class each day...
The founders of InCom Corp., the start-up firm marketing the idea, work at local schools or have children who attend them. They formed the firm about a year ago and paid the district $2,500 to test the system during summer school...Impressed, school trustees last October agreed to expand the project. They held a public hearing, but virtually no parents attended. In exchange for allowing it on campus, InCom promised unspecified royalties from future sales.
On Jan. 18, every student at the kindergarten-through-eighth grade school got a badge, though scanners were installed only in seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms. Most of the pupils accepted it at first, but a few griped to their parents.
Mike and Dawn Cantrall, parents of two Brittan students, met with Graham to complain about the badges' having student photos and names, saying the information made them vulnerable to predators. Only then did they learn about the radio tags inside. The family asked that their children be excluded from the test. "Our children are not inventory," the Cantralls said in a letter to the district. They said the monitoring program smacked of Big Brother. They also cited biblical warnings about the mark of the beast...
After a rambunctious Feb. 8 board meeting, InCom opted to turn off the scanners until the board resolved the squabbling. As school let out before last week's board meeting, foes prowled either side of campus with picket signs. "Badges … badges…. We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges," said one.
Emphases all mine. What a classic mess. Parents citing biblical warnings from Revelations, picket signs, parents missing some important public hearings, the concept of using RFID to better track attendance and keep school funding, kids who feel like produce on the shelf - it's all here.
Posted by kswygert at February 22, 2005 02:03 PM