Northside Independent School District plans to track students next
year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student
identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of
its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.
District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System
(RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students —
and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to
help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.
Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.
The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but,
in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with
some questioning it on privacy grounds.
State officials and national school safety experts said the
technology was introduced in the past decade but has not been widely
adopted. Northside's deputy superintendent of administration, Brian Woods,
who will take over as superintendent in July, defended the use of RFID
chips at Tuesday's meeting, comparing it to security cameras. He
stressed that the program is only a pilot and not permanent.
“We want to harness the power of (the) technology to make schools
safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and
increase revenues,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said.
“Parents expect that we always know where their children are, and this technology will help us do that.”
Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's
location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only
authorized administrative officials will have access to the information,
Gonzalez said.
“This way we can see if a student is at the nurse's office or
elsewhere on campus, when they normally are counted for attendance in
first period,” he said.
Gonzalez said the district plans to send letters to parents whose
students are getting the the RFID-tagged ID cards. He said officials
understand that students could leave the card somewhere, throwing off
the system. They cost $15 each, and if lost, a student will have to pay
for a new one.
Parents interviewed outside Jay and Jones as they picked up their
children Thursday were either supportive, skeptical or offended.
Veronica Valdorrinos said she would be OK if the school tracks her
daughter, a senior at Jay, as she always fears for her safety. Ricardo
and Juanita Roman, who have two daughters there, said they didn't like that Jay was targeted.
Gonzalez said the district picked schools with lower attendance rates and staff willing to pilot the tags.
Some parents said they understood the benefits but had reservations over privacy.
“I would hope teachers can help motivate students to be in their seats instead of the district having to do this,” said Margaret Luna,
whose eighth-grade granddaughter at Jones will go to Jay next year.
“But I guess this is what happens when you don't have enough money.”
The district plans to spend $525,065 to implement the pilot program
and $136,005 per year to run it, but it will more than pay for itself,
predicted Steve Bassett,
Northside's assistant superintendent for budget and finance. If
successful, Northside would get $1.7 million next year from both higher
attendance and Medicaid reimbursements for busing special education
students, he said.
But the payoff could be a lot bigger if the program goes districtwide, Bassett said.
He said the program was one way the growing district could respond to
the Legislature's cuts in state education funding. Northside trimmed
its budget last year by $61.4 million.
Two school districts in the Houston area — Spring and Santa Fe ISDs —
have used the technology for several years and have reported gains of
hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for improved attendance.
Spring ISD spokeswoman Karen Garrison said the district, one-third the size of Northside, hasn't had any parent backlash.
In Tuesday's board debate, trustee M'Lissa M. Chumbley
said she worried that parents might feel the technology violated their
children's privacy rights. She didn't want administrators tracking
teachers' every move if they end up outfitted with the tags, she added.
“I think this is overstepping our bounds and is inappropriate,” Chumbley said. “I'm honestly uncomfortable about this.”
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