Texas school strikes devil's bargain, drops RFID student tracking The Texas school that expelled a student for refusing to comply with its plan to track pupils with RFID tags has dropped the scheme, saying it just doesn't work. In November, Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas, began a trial of RFID tracking for students in an attempt to cut down on truancy. The …
Schools have lots of rooms, and lots of corridors. Each needs a camera, but actually you need two cameras that can see each other so as to deter the darlings from destroying the cameras.
A few years back, a workmate's wife moved out of secondary school teaching in a reasonably affluent suburb of Canberra. She was sick of being threatened and physically abused by children whose parents would simply refuse to entertain the idea that their offspring were less than perfect, and who made every escalation up the rung of disciplinary measures into a pitched battle. She would have welcomed cameras in the classroom, and I'm sure that the students who enjoyed similar treatment to her at the hands of the same thugs (of both sexes) would probably prefer surveillance to the ongoing threat of assault.
[Yes, I am bitter, and I do think of the lot I had to deal with in high school and wonder whether as they got older, they continued to enjoy causing suffering whenever they could get away with it. If so, I hope that their smoking habits are starting to catch up with them in various malignant ways, so as to slow them down a tad.]
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So lemme get this straight...the prison cum hall of higher education (such as what passes for "education" in Tejanoland) couldn't get their truancy rates down, so the spent a buttload of money to chip and pin the prisoners students, and when those rascally students figured out how to game the system, they throw all that money down the drain and turn the fortress school building into a surveillance zone worthy of any super-max prison...at some undisclosed "additional cost", right?
We can see how well these administrators benefited from a quality Texas education, all right.
Following concerns about wireless technology a new direct student-student cabled network system has been introduced = Combined Houston Area Integrated Network - Gang
In partnership with the department of transport the students will also be taking part in a new practical course of road side hydrological engineering
They were pretty brave to admit it was completely wasted!
I can imagine the RFID company's business plan:
1. Do
2. Sell Expensive pilot RFID student tracking system to School
3. School finds system is ineffective and scraps it
4. Buy back hardware at half-price
5. Make unspecified "software improvements"
6. Double Expensive, increment School
7. Until School too scared to admit money is wasted
This school is in Texas, after all... Texas and its state government have already demonstrated that education is unimportant to them, especially to the governor and the legislature. Why not just give all the kids a choice of attending high school or starting their prison career a couple of years early.
I have great but cheap way to track the students. Make them all wear uniforms. To make sure these kids are the right kids make them wear a neckless with their student ID. To make it easier track the kids on camera , put there student ID on the uniforms. Then have hall monitors checks the student IDs .The student IDs would be used to to clock them in and out. Oh and to make it easier to see if some is leaving the grounds before they should out a giant P I mean S on the back of the uniforms. Dont forget the random locker checks.
I have great but cheap way to track the students. Make them all wear uniforms.
But this is America and if you do this you'll get "1st Ammendment" nutters taking you to court for infringing the "free speach" rights of wearing your own choice of clothes - alternatively others will find reasons to get the uniform struck down on basis of religious/gender/race reasons. (I lived for a few years in California at the end of th 90s and definitely remember reading an article in a paper from someone explaining how to ensure that your child didn't have to wear school uniform and it was mainly based on 1st ammendment rights)
The UK? We here in the old world are way ahead of that, take a look at this. Specially the "extra security" box in the bottom right. Voluntary fingerprinting? I didn't think so; so I had to tell my kids that they can't buy at the school shop/ canteen and have to take a packed lunch. They even agreed.
And then I found that to pay for a school trip, you had to do this through this same sQuid service, with all the bells and whistles of the fingerprints again. It took me hours in talks to get them to accept an alternative payment and in the end I had to write out my first ever UK cheque.
Are there cameras in the toilets/ restrooms? Yep, there are.
"I didn't think so; so I had to tell my kids that they can't buy at the school shop/ canteen and have to take a packed lunch. They even agreed."
Bear in mind the article on the Beeb website the other days where this some campaign or other asking for the banning of packed lunches in schools because some parents are not putting a proper balanced diet in their little darlings lunchboxes.
Here's an idea, the teachers can just call out names at the start of the class. If a student isnt there, then write that down. If the student misses a certain amount of classes, they fail and have to redo the class next year. Sure you will end up with some morons still repeating 8th grade classes at age 30, but most will drop out at a very young age and then who cares.
There's plenty of gas stations around the country...
_The school could spend the money getting class sizes down to a reasonable size where the teacher actually has a chance of spotting if someone is playing truant. It's old-fashioned, but it might just work_
That's ridiculously sensible.
I don't think they have a problem spotting the missing students. I think the problem is that by the time they know the student is missing it is too late to prevent it. Then the school district loses money. Maybe extra teachers would help, maybe not. Given that the issue is money, I'm guessing it's an inner city school with little involvement from parents, or worse what involvement they do have inhibits a good educational environment. It's a tough nut to crack.
Personally I'm willing to try a radical experiment: provide a set amount of money available to each student for his schooling. Student can go to any public or private institution which admit him. If you are truant, you lose the access to the money. Keep the pot of money relatively fixed based on census data, so that if someone drops out, more money becomes available to the kids who remain. Formula should include more money for special needs students than average Joe to handle that aspect.
Either that or make it illegal to go to school so all the kids will want to try it.
The school burns cash to earn cash - this is all about earning money and seems out of place in this scenario, its a school! Some kids just don't want to learn. Why burn cash to force them to be in school when they just don't want to be? Spend the money on improving the school experience for the kids who DO want to learn. What a joke, teachers are out looking for missing kids just so the school can earn money. Teach the kids that did bother to turn up FFS!
When I went through school there was no concept of developing a good work ethic, and personal responsibility, and the lifelong repercussions of making no effort in life. Whilst this is something parents should do, I am sure most parents don't actually have any idea how to be parents, or don't want to be.
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