Students will be tracked via chips in IDs
By Francisco Vara-Orta
Updated 11:44 p.m., Thursday, May 24, 2012
Northside Independent School District plans to track
students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their
student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112
of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.
District officials said the Radio Frequency
Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to
locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school
day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.
Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County,
plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High
School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride
district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.
The school board unanimously approved the program late
Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first,
with some questioning it on privacy grounds.
State officials and national school safety experts said
the technology was introduced in the past decade but has not been widely
adopted. Northside's deputy superintendent of administration, Brian Woods, who
will take over as superintendent in July, defended the use of RFID chips at
Tuesday's meeting, comparing it to security cameras. He stressed that the
program is only a pilot and not permanent.
“We want to harness the power of (the) technology to make
schools safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and
increase revenues,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. “Parents expect
that we always know where their children are, and this technology will help us
do that.”
Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a
student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only
authorized administrative officials will have access to the information, Gonzalez
said.
“This way we can see if a student is at the nurse's
office or elsewhere on campus, when they normally are counted for attendance in
first period,” he said.
Gonzalez said the district plans to send letters to
parents whose students are getting the RFID-tagged ID cards. He said officials
understand that students could leave the card somewhere, throwing off the
system. They cost $15 each, and if lost, a student will have to pay for a new
one.
Parents interviewed outside Jay and Jones as they picked
up their children Thursday were either supportive, skeptical or offended.
Veronica Valdorrinos said she would be OK if the school
tracks her daughter, a senior at Jay, as she always fears for her safety.
Ricardo and Juanita Roman, who have two daughters there, said they didn't like
that Jay was targeted.
Gonzalez said the district picked schools with lower
attendance rates and staff willing to pilot the tags.
Some parents said they understood the benefits but had
reservations over privacy.
“I would hope teachers can help motivate students to be
in their seats instead of the district having to do this,” said Margaret Luna,
whose eighth-grade granddaughter at Jones will go to Jay next year. “But I
guess this is what happens when you don't have enough money.”
The district plans to spend $525,065 to implement the
pilot program and $136,005 per year to run it, but it will more than pay for
itself, predicted Steve Bassett, Northside's assistant superintendent for
budget and finance. If successful, Northside would get $1.7 million next year
from both higher attendance and Medicaid reimbursements for busing special
education students, he said.
But the payoff could be a lot bigger if the program goes
district wide, Bassett said.
He said the program was one way the growing district
could respond to the Legislature's cuts in state education funding. Northside
trimmed its budget last year by $61.4 million.
Two school districts in the Houston area — Spring and
Santa Fe ISDs — have used the technology for several years and have reported
gains of hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for improved attendance.
Spring ISD spokeswoman Karen Garrison said the district, one-third the size of
Northside, hasn't had any parent backlash.
In Tuesday's board debate, trustee M'Lissa M. Chumbley
said she worried that parents might feel the technology violated their
children's privacy rights. She didn't want administrators tracking teachers'
every move if they end up outfitted with the tags, she added.
“I think this is overstepping our bounds and is
inappropriate,” Chumbley said. “I'm honestly uncomfortable about this.”
Northside has to walk a tightrope in selling the idea to
parents, some of whom could be turned off by the revenue incentive, said
Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a
Cleveland-based consulting firm.
The American Civil Liberties Union fought the use of the
technology in 2005 at a rural elementary school in California and helped get
the program canceled, said Kirsten Bokenkamp, an ACLU spokeswoman in Texas. She
said concerns about the tags include privacy and the risks of identity theft or
kidnapping if somebody hacks into the system.
Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said
no state law or policy regulates the use of such devices and the decision is up
to local districts.
fvara-orta@express-news.net
Twitter: @fvaraorta
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