San Antonio, Texas – A Texas high school has launched a program that requires students to wear microchip-embedded school IDs around their necks at all times.
John Jay High School in San Antonio initiated the “Student Locator Project,” a scheme that promises to track and monitor every kid’s location throughout each school day.
The program is intended to reduce truancy (and thus generate more money for the school), yet the Northside Independent Schools District in San Antonio continues to face opposition to the scheme.
Indeed, like every oppressive measure foisted on kids by authority figures, the program has already met with resistance, with some students refusing to wear their IDs.
And kids aren’t the only ones crying foul. One objector is dad Steven Hernandez, who requested on religious grounds that his daughter, Andrea Hernandez, could be absolved of wearing her RFID chip. Although the school offered to remove the chip from the youngster’s school ID, Andrea herself told Catholic Online she was warned that not wearing her ID would see her effectively banned from voting for the school’s homecoming royalty. Hernandez said:
“I had a teacher tell me I would not be allowed to vote because I did not have the proper voter ID. I had my old student ID card which they originally told us would be good for the entire four years we were in school. He said I needed the new ID with the chip in order to vote.”
RFID chip-enabled IDs are not a totally new phenomenon. A handful of other schools in Texas have been tracking students in this manner for some time, and some parents approve of the scheme, saying it lets them know their child is safe.
What do you think about RFID tagging students? Logical use of modern technology or Orwellian nightmare in the making?