Heck... it works for our cattle
February 13, 2005 3:38 PM   Subscribe

Brittan Elementary, a rural Californian school, has begun requiring their students to wear RFID tags manufactured by Alien Technology. This was done without parental consent and is mandatory. The ACLU is less than enthusiastic.
posted by cedar (28 comments total)
 
Brittan Elementary, a rural Californian school, has begun requiring their students to wear RFID tags manufactured by Alien Technology
So Mulder was on to something after all...
posted by Sangermaine at 3:47 PM on February 13, 2005


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.
Well, as long as it makes less work for the school, who gives a fuck what students or their parents think?
posted by c13 at 4:00 PM on February 13, 2005


The only problem I see here is having the kids wear the badges outside of school grounds. And since the tag is on a badge, what's to stop the kids from handing the badge to a friend and saying "I think I'll just skip this class"? Now, if they wanted to start placing one of these things under the kids skin, then there would be a serious problem.

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.

The first part seems to be about more that just the tags, but the badges themselves. And the "health risks?" Please.
posted by boymilo at 4:08 PM on February 13, 2005


If a child is truant, prosecute the parents, holding them responsible for their own children.

That's what I'd advise, but personal responsibility is dead in America.
posted by Saydur at 4:49 PM on February 13, 2005


c13: We all should. The answer to improving our schools is not "who gives a fuck what the students or their parents think." All this aside, RFID tagging little kids is retarded.

First of all: This. All you need to locate little Billy in that complex maze of hallways, or better yet, out on the playground. Secondly, I don't care how simple it makes things for the school administration, I want to be notified before anybody puts any device that transmits a signal on my kid. Maybe if the tech people at my kid's school called me at work and said, "Hey, Mr. Balrog? Do you mind if we put a bluetooth-integrated RFID transmission tag on your kid so anybody with a UHF receiver or a wireless card can..." on second thought, no way. This is almost as bad as the secret bible classes.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 4:51 PM on February 13, 2005


Amm.. Baby_Balrog, I'm being sarcastic here... :-)
posted by c13 at 4:59 PM on February 13, 2005


If a child is truant, prosecute the parents, holding them responsible for their own children.

Alternatively, cut off their food stamps, HEAP benefits, Medicaid and access to the social services system. That way you can trim a few bucks from the budget while demonstrating that unfit -- or overburdened, working three jobs without adequate child care while trying to get an education and trying to collect support from the prick that abandoned his kids to feed his meth habit -- parents probably shouldn't have had children in the first place.

After a generation or two they'll get the picture and soon learn that we'll be damned if our tax dollars are going feed, clothe and keep their ill-bred progeny warm. A couple of kids suffer along way? Oh well, it's collateral damage and in the end the gene pool can only benefit.

Jeb! in '08
posted by cedar at 5:02 PM on February 13, 2005


I'm not following the logic of RFID=bad.
It's a way of accounting for the kids that helps reduce human error.
I understand about the lack of parental involvement, so yeah, they should of notified the parents (as baby_balrog said). Maybe I'm just dense? Is it just the lack of the parents in the decisional process, or is there something about RFID I'm missing?
posted by forforf at 5:27 PM on February 13, 2005


"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?"

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.


There is more in the article itself, forforf.
posted by c13 at 5:41 PM on February 13, 2005


Forlorf, children aren't commodities. This isn't a shirt at The Gap, beef on the hoof in feed lot or a container of Sanyo DVD players. I don't need my children tracked, I do a pretty good job keeping track of them myself. In thirteen years I have yet to lose one and don't think that it is unreasonable of me to expect the same from the school.

I'm a tech guy and I'll tell you, keeping track of RFID chips and parsing the information is a whole lot more difficult and prone to problems than having a teacher count the kids in his/her classroom 1st period. There is no conceivable way this is going to make anything easier on anybody except the folks crunching the numbers, the only people who are going to be happy are the ones running the spreadsheets every quarter to determine who's been naughty and who's been nice.

"Reduce human error." Your kidding right? All they have done is increase the potential damage when the inevitable mistake rolls around. Rather than counting a a single kid improperly, they can now, with the wrong setting on a file or a misplaced keystroke, leave the entire student body vulnerable to having their identifying information made available to anybody with the desire and smarts to look for it. I'm having a hard time seeing this school districts IT security as the equal of the Fortune 500 companies people are wardriving every day.

Even in Podunk, CA I can't see having kids wandering around with their names and photos around their necks as increasing anybody's security.
posted by cedar at 5:49 PM on February 13, 2005


Couldn't be about money could it? Let's see. Sell this idea nationwide and sell x-million badges at x dollars...............nah. No way. notreally.
posted by notreally at 5:50 PM on February 13, 2005


I can't understand how RFID badges make keeping attendance easier. Doesn't it just introduce unnecessary complications into the process? Badges can be lost, computers can crash, RFID chips can fail, kids can pass badges to their friends to fake attendance, etc.

How in a million years does this simplify anything?
posted by mr_roboto at 6:06 PM on February 13, 2005


(As for the health risks: an RFID reader uses about the same sorts of fields as the common anti-theft gates at stores and, in my old grade schools, the school library.)
posted by hattifattener at 7:06 PM on February 13, 2005


Don't a lot of schools already require mandatory school id's, often hung around the kid's necks?
posted by smackfu at 7:13 PM on February 13, 2005


It's a way of accounting for the kids that helps reduce human error.

Is it really that hard for a teacher to spend two minutes taking roll at the beginning of class? How did we EVER account for children before RFID?

My child is not a commodity. If a school needs RFID to track children, then there are other issues at work here. And does the school actually have a truancy problem?

Schools are increasing getting arrogant and demanding with children. We've gotten static for refusing to give health insurance information for field trips. Why? Because it's none of their damn business, simple as that. if there's an accident, we'll give the information to the hospital but theres no reason for the school to have it.

Last year, my kid's school was subjected to school lock down/drug search complete with drug sniffing dogs and scores of police. Several days after this happened we got a letter from the school, vaguely describing the event with not mention of the procedures (having to stand in lines, turn out their pockets, etc).

The hysterical part? According to my kid, the other children have already figured out that the searches only occur once a year, sometime in october or november. so they've already figured out how to game the system. mind you, no drugs have ever been found during these searches.

What strikes me most about the school in California is the absolute arrogance of the district administer. I'd be calling for his head and initiating a law suit.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:42 PM on February 13, 2005


forforf demurs "I'm not following the logic of RFID=bad. It's a way of accounting for the kids that helps reduce human error."

Among other problems, it's a way of accounting for RFID tags -- not the kids themselves -- without human error but also without human intervention.

"Yeah, so after I snatched the kid, I put the tag on a cat I'd gotten from the pound, squirted Tabasco sauce up the cat's ass to make sure it would run around and tossed the cat down the step into the school's basement.

"The teachers had done got in the habit of trusting the computer an' not counting the kids themselves. The school's computer kept insisting the kid wuz on the school grounds and moving around, so I wuz in Tijuana before they ever realized the kid was missing!"
posted by orthogonality at 7:44 PM on February 13, 2005


Put me down for "this is ridiculous." It is intrusive and unecessary. If, as someone mentioned above, there is a great need to keep track of students, where there wasn't before, perhaps it's time to consider building more schools (than prisons and arms) so we can make them more managable.
posted by LouReedsSon at 9:36 PM on February 13, 2005


I'm waiting for the local Fred and George Weasley to hack into the system and create a WIFI-enabled Marauder's Map.
posted by mach at 10:09 PM on February 13, 2005


Hehe,
thirty years from now we'll all be chuckling about those Luddites who were worried about tracking individuals. Maybe it won't be RFID but iris scans (a la Vanilla Sky) or little robots analyzing snippets of your hair for your DNA or something entirely different unimagined.

And probably it'll be all "voluntary", i.e. something like mandatory bio-verification if you want to log on to the Internet, which by that time will have become so essential that you can't do anything without it.

Not that I think that this development is to be welcomed.


It's written in the scriptures, I tell'ya...
posted by sour cream at 10:42 PM on February 13, 2005


it's a way of accounting for RFID tags -- not the kids themselves -- without human error but also without human intervention.

That's it! The next step is to assign the tags permanently to the kids. Then when a tag shows up as truant, the school's computer sends a message to the tag's home, reminding the child's parents to be sure the tag gets on the bus in the morning.

Soon, every seat in all the classrooms will be occupied by . . . a tag. Think of the potential savings! No more need for a school nurse, or an athletic program, or a library, or - teachers!

It's genius!

posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:46 AM on February 14, 2005


Ah shucks - the older kids will learn PDQ that sticking the freakin badge in a microwave for a few seconds will render it useless. I wonder what the schools budget is for replacing the tags? Enough "damaged" tags would ensure the cancellation of this little "program".

The nerdy/hacker kids will learn how to "game the system" - buy their own cheap RFID chips and get 'em to lie, or overload the system with crazy/useless data (oh look; 50,000 "Ronald McDonalds" showed up today... whoops...).
posted by jkaczor at 3:57 AM on February 14, 2005


So, the chip manufacturers gave the school thousands of dollars, and a commission on each kid that's tagged. I wonder what the superintendent's take is.

This is just insane. It means that a kid could be kidnapped and it might take hours before anyone notices. You know, I had a teacher who had to be 80 years old if she was a day...and somehow, she managed to count and record all 30 kids every morning.

This technology is unnecessary, unwarranted, and nothing more than a profit center for the manufacturers, the school, and possibly the person who instigated all of it. I want some bank records from this guy...cause I'm betting he's making money from the deal.
posted by dejah420 at 8:54 AM on February 14, 2005


Amm.. Baby_Balrog, I'm being sarcastic here... :-)

ah..c13. My deepest apologies. I deal with many, many individuals on a daily basis who would adamently defend your (albeit sarcastic) remark.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:13 AM on February 14, 2005


Not much of a contribution to this discussion, but I went to Brittan School for a few years. My visits back to Sutter in later years have impressed on me how completely miniscule the place was (and still is!). I'm really surprised to see it not only mentioned on Mefi but mentioned in a way that relates to technology.

(and: My kids have to wear laminated ID cards around their necks at school here near San Diego, but I've never heard of a school with RFID tags.)
posted by routergirl at 9:51 AM on February 14, 2005


iirc a similar thread was posted on MetaFilter around the end of Fall or early Winter yet I can't find it in "search."
Any member recalls the news story? Not sure if it is the same school or school system, but if it is, it was not a surprise when the system was implemented, that day, the kid's the parents had no knowledge when the RFID tags would be issued to the students or upon enrollment.

The problem was the parents had no input or knowledge before the enrollment of the child or before the school year started. So if they had known they may have not enrolled their child.

Basically what I am saying is, if this was the same school, the parents knew it was coming, yet it was a surprised before and up to when the RFID were issued to the students. The children did not start the school year with them on.
posted by thomcatspike at 11:01 AM on February 14, 2005


If a child is truant, prosecute the parents, holding them responsible for their own children.

That's what I'd advise, but personal responsibility is dead in America.


My parents would probably still be in jail so I don't think I can support that solution in good conscience. I maybe attended half of my HS classes so I may be a little ahead of average in the truancy game but I can think of a dozen ways to circumvent that system. The only way they can prove the kid wasn't there in a your word against mine scenario is to also take a roll call, so what's the point?

This reminds me of the time my HS introduced fool-proof bar coded library cards! Or my college tied student ID numbers to phone call charges!
posted by fshgrl at 11:35 AM on February 14, 2005


similar thread was posted on MetaFilter around the end of Fall or early Winter

Change below;
it was a surprised before and up to when the RFID were issued to the students.

To; it was a surprise up until this past late Fall or early Winter, not now.
posted by thomcatspike at 1:42 PM on February 14, 2005



iirc a similar thread was posted on MetaFilter around the end of Fall or early Winter yet I can't find it in "search."
RFID to track students in Spring, Texas...

my memory should be RFID for better commenting
posted by thomcatspike at 2:46 PM on February 14, 2005


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