San Antonio schools track students via RFID chips - creepy or cool?

Two San Antonio schools, Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School, have turned to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in order to keep track of the whereabouts of students on campus and maintain correct attendance records.

Writes Charles Haddock for NBC News:

Students at Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School are required to wear ID cards imbedded with electronic chips, similar to highway toll tags, which allow schools to more accurately record daily attendance.  Public school funding is often tied to the number of students attending class each day. The Northside Independent School District in San Antonio receives about $30 per day in state funding for each student reporting present.

The RFID tracking system can help schools count students who are in the school building, but may have missed the morning roll call.  On a recent morning at Anson Jones Middle School, where 1,200 attend, the traditional roll call counted 71 students absent.  But the RFID system indicated that eight of those 71 were actually in school that day.  A map indicated several students were in the band hall, where practice was running late, while others were near the office.  That’s eight times $30 or $240 the school would have lost that day in funding. 

Pascual Gonzalez, Northside’s communications director, estimates the entire district has been losing about $1.7 million a year because of underreported attendance. He says the RFID system, which costs $261,000, should pay for itself in the first year.

Now, I’m all for schools getting the funding they deserve, so if a kid is in class then by all means the school should get their thirty bucks. However, the RFID tracking business seems a bit on the creepifying side to me. Couldn’t this problem just as easily be solved by keeping track of tardy attendance as well? Supposedly the ID tags can only be tracked on campus, but in this digital age can that really be guaranteed? And even if the school doesn’t track the kid off campus, how difficult would it be for someone else to hijack the tech?

Objections to the use of the RFID trackers runs the gamut from religious (comparing the trackers to the “mark of the beast” mentioned in Revelation) to secular (the number of Big Brother references is no doubt large). Even the American Civil Liberties Union is on the case, calling the tags “dehumanizing.”

“What kind of lesson does it teach our children if they’re chipped like cattle and their every movement tracked?” asks Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Washington, D.C. office.  “It doesn’t create the kind of independent, autonomous people that we want in our democratic society.”

Gonzalez, Northside’s spokesman, insists that the tags won’t be used to spy on or excessively monitor the students, citing a lack of staff to do so and a lack of interest. According to him, the only thing the system will be used for is to provide an accurate count of students present each day, therefore helping the district make money. Based on the early results from Anson and John Jay, Northside may very well consider expanding the program to the other 109 schools in the district.

Like I said earlier, I don’t have a problem with school districts getting the money they deserve, but I think there are far less creepy/intrusive ways to go about ensuring that they do. I’ve read Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, and 1984 is on my to-read list; I’ve got enough concerns about the dystopian future we may or may not be barrelling towards at full speed. I don’t need San Antonio’s schools using attendance monitoring as an excuse for bringing us closer to it.

(But Victoria, you may say, there are RFID chips in all kinds of things these days, like toll passes and credit cards and passports! Yes. Yes there are, and I think they’re a little creepifying as well. Then again, as I said, I have been reading a lot of dystopian literature lately.)