Rhode Island school to track students with RFID tags
Jeff Johnson
OneNewsNow.com
January 11, 2008

 
A Rhode Island school district plans to begin using Radio Frequency Identification -- or RFID -- technology to track students, starting next week. But the plan is not without opposition. Neal McCluskey with the Cato Institute says while the program may have good intentions, it is still a bad idea.
 
 

The Middletown, Rhode Island, school district will attach RFID tags to the book bags of about 80 children who ride buses to and from school. The system is supposed to allow the district and parents to know whether their children are on the bus. Global Positioning System (GPS) devices will also allow officials and parents to locate buses.
 
A spokesperson for the district told Associated Press that the system will improve accountability and efficiency of the schools' transportation services. But McCluskey, education policy analyst for the Cato Institute, says Americans should be concerned any time any government entity, like a public school, wants to gather more information about them.
 
"And I think a lot of people, with good reason, see this sort of as the camel's nose under the tent of greater tracking, more intrusion on personal freedom and independence," he says.
 
"It'll all be cast in terms like 'It's for their safety. It's for efficiency' -- which, you know, might be legitimate reasons to do it," the Cato Institute analyst acknowledges. "But when it comes from a government entity ... unless it's truly, fully voluntary, people are very worried that it's going to become something much bigger than it starts out as and it's a legitimate concern."
 
The fundamental problem, according to McCluskey, is that the plan will be imposed upon parents who pay for the school through their taxes and who may have legitimate concerns about privacy and other tracking applications of the technology -- such as tracking students during and after school.
 
In addition to privacy concerns and fears of expanded use of such electronic monitoring of children, security experts point out that the system would only track whether the RFID tag, not the actual child, is or is not on the bus. Advocates for school choice say the program is evidence of the laziness of some public school administrators, who should -- they say -- already have systems in place to know the location of every student for the entire school day.
 
 

All Original Content Copyright 2006-2008 American Family News Network - All Rights Reserved