A school district in Rhode Island wants to start implanting RFID chips into the schoolbags of students. This is a pilot program that hasn’t been done before. The school feels that this would help them monitor students. The ACLU says that this violates the privacy of the students, and could actually risk their safety.
In my opinion, this is a very strange way to use technology. The Middletown School District, in Rhode Island, is interested in launching a pilot program that it feels would help them to better monitor some of its students. The school wants to put RFID chips into the backpacks of 80 students.
An RFID chip stands for “radio frequency identification”. The school district is planning on putting these chips into the backpacks of 80 children at Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number. A device that has been installed in one of the schools two school busses would be able to read the RFID chip as the child gets on, or gets off, the bus. The busses are going to have GPS (global positioning system) devices in them.
The idea is that parents can log into a secure website, and find out, for certain, if their child is on the bus that he or she is supposed to be on. The parent, and the school, will know when the child arrived at the school building, and if the child found the correct bus to get on at the end of the school day. The parents could also learn precisely where that particular school bus is at in “real time”.
I have not found anything that specifically notes which children will be selected for this pilot program. My suspicion is that this school has exactly 80 children who have been officially placed into the special needs program, and that these are the kids who are being “tagged”. I do not have any information that would confirm, or deny, my suspicion, however.
The Rhode Island Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) believes that using microchips to keep track of the location of children is an invasion of the children’s privacy. They feel that the school should already know where their students are. They also believe that this program is a potential risk to the safety of the children.
The school district, on the other hand, feels that the use of the RFID is the same as other programs that have been used to allow parents to monitor their children’s school experience. Parents can check on their child’s attendance record. Parents can learn what their children were served at lunch. Those are the two examples given by the Superintendent of the school district in Rhode Island that wants to use the RFID chips.
Interestingly, this tracking system was given to the school district for free. It did not require the school to spend any of its budget on the RFID system. Therefore, since no money was spent, the program did not have to obtain the approval of the Rhode Island ethics commission.
Image by midnightcomm on Flickr