So HB wasn’t feeling so hot this morning when she woke up so she climbed back into bed and an executive decision was made to stay off school today which means I stayed home too… In my experience if I hadn’t called the school to tell them that HB wasn’t attending today they wouldn’t have noticed she wasn’t around. From my understanding of HB’s school.. if a pupil doesn’t turn up for class no big deal is made about it and they are just marked absent. Now… if my daughter doesn’t turn up for class how do they know for sure that she is home??? How do they know that she wasn’t hurt or in an accident or worse still picked up by someone on the way to school. They don’t… but…. and this is the bit that really infuriates me… the school doesn’t call anyone to check where a pupil is if they don’t hear from a family member.

Somehow I ended up reading about RFID Tagging on Wikidpedia today *snores* and followed a link.. and another and another… you know how it goes and I ended up reading this old post on The Register.

Parent power detags US schoolkids

Parent protests have forced the scrapping of an RFID tagging scheme at an elementary school in California. The firm behind the technology decided to pull the plug after parents and the American Civil Liberties Union expressed health and privacy concerns over the deployment, CNET reports.

The school in Sutter, north of Sacramento, issued 160 seventh and eighth-graders with RFID badges a month ago as part of its “wireless attendance program.” Kids wore the badges around their necks and scanned them when they entered the classroom. The school reckoned that the scheme would “reduce attendance tracking errors and be a timesaver for teachers and administrators”.

Parents disagreed, and their vociferous protests against the tags attracted media attention which in turn provoked the company behind the program - InCom - to beat a hasty retreat. Privacy groups also weighed into the debate, with Electronic Privacy Information Center spokesman Cedric Laurant declaring: “Monitoring children with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags is a very bad idea. It treats children like livestock or shipment pallets, thereby breaching their right to dignity and privacy they have as human beings. Any small gain in administrative efficiency and security is not worth the money spent and the privacy and dignity lost.”

The issue of money raised a few eyebrows among critics of the tagging. The school had a profit-sharing deal with locally-based InCom by which it hoped to earn cash from the sale of the technology to other schools. As part of the arrangement, InCom supplied the Sutter school with free kit.

By Lester Haines

Published Friday 18th February 2005 15:22 GMT

OK OK.. I know its an old article but it got me thinking… and yes it all stinks of backhanders and underhandedness (???) when you read that InCom had a deal with the school.. but yanno… I think that if the school had gone about this in the right way and had different priorities for WHY they were doing it SAFETY AND SECURITY of the children instead of easing up on administration and workloads the idea may have been a damn sight more successful than it was.

Bugger attendance records and such like. I think it would have been a success if they had used it as some kind of safety tracking device.. say for instance when a child left the school during school hours or if a child wasn’t in the class they were meant to be in. Say for example a childs pass wasn’t activated by a certain time in the morning then the school would know immediately that the child wasn’t in school and could make calls to find out why. Isn’t it a safety bonus to be able to locate a child by an alarm or alert going off if the childs security pass goes off school grounds or doesn’t check in to class?? A school in Japan is trying out.. or at least.. was. Maybe it was the ban on the sweet shop that made it unsuccessful.

Joking aside.. the Vatican Library uses it to find books.. why can’t it be implimented to find kids in schools.

I don’t see a problem with it if its used for the right reasons…. imagine if something happened to your child on the way to school.. the school can start making calls as soon as the childs pass shows that they aren’t in school by an allocated time. Or how about if a child gets hurt or something… the pass could be used to locate the child if they were still in the school grounds.

I dunno… maybe I’m missing something here… or too accepting of Big Brother.

And on a side note.. this guy… hes had RFID chips put into each hand… he wants to “do stuff” with them.. like.. unlock his car door without keys or open his front door without having to touch it… yanno.. important stuff like that.. anyway… hes got a picture on his Flickr site… of his pc set up.. HERE.. can someone please tell me how on earth you use 2 monitors off of one pc.. let along 4 monitors???

I’m technologically challenged aren’t I???