Fury as primary school tags children
Parents have voiced outrage at a California primary school which is making children wear radio frequency identification badges to track their every move.
The badges, introduced at Brittan Elementary School on January 18, rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.
Each child must 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.
While similar devices are being tested at several schools in Japan so parents can know when their children arrive and leave, Brittan, near Yuba City, appears to be the first US school district to embrace such a monitoring system.
“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.
“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 barcodes to the existing IDs so pupils 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 George Orwell.
“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 said he told his children, in the 5th and 7th grades, not to wear the badges. He also sent a protest letter to the board and alerted the ACLU.
But not everyone in the close-knit farming town north west of Sacramento is against the system. Some said they welcomed the IDs as a security measure.
“Bad things can happen here,” said Tim Crabtree, an area parent.
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 did not 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 received from parents.
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 said the devices did not emit any cancer-causing radioactivity, and that for now, they merely confirmed that each child was in his or her classroom, rather than track them around the school like a global-positioning device. The 15-digit ID number that confirmed attendance was encrypted, he said, and not linked to other personal information such as an address or telephone number.
