November 17, 2004 | RFIDs Are For Kids

A Texas school district is requiring its 28,000 students to wear RFID badges so that the district can track when the kids get on or off school buses, according to Matt Richtel's article in The New York Times. The school system spent $180,000 on the system.

Similar efforts are underway in other school districts, including one in Buffalo, New York using RFID to track student attendance.

Backers say it is for the children.

Advocates of the technology said they did not plan to go that far. But, they said, they do see broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags. More immediately, they said, they could see using the technology to track whether students attend individual classes.

Mr. Weisinger, the head of transportation at Spring, said that, for now, the district could not afford not to put the technology to use. Chief Bragg said the key to catching kidnappers was getting crucial information within two to four hours of a crime - information such as the last place the child was seen.

"We've been fortunate; we haven't had a kidnapping," Mr. Weisinger said. "But if it works one time finding a student who has been kidnapped, then the system has paid for itself."

Actually, the district is not just fortunate for not having a kidnapping -- it is statistically normal.

Kidnappings are rare events, especially those perpetrated by non-family members (at most 300 cases nationwide a year, but I think that number is severely inflated). And nothing in this program will help to stop such kidnappings, since all the badges will do is tell a parent when a child left school or got off a bus.

Every year, about a half a million kids run away and about 125,000 are kicked out of their house.

Somehow that however does not lead to public policy changes (more school therapists and counselors, for one).

Maybe that's because most school counselors are not as sexy as cutting-edge technology to keep the big bad wolf from abducting the cute white blond kid.

Nor do counselors or intervention groups have the side benefit of increasing school administrators' control over their charges.

Posted by Ryan Singel at November 17, 2004 09:56 AM

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