Every Wednesday in Sutter, California, a silo-dotted farm town north of Sacramento, Brittan Elementary School publishes its weekly newsletter. Principal Earnie Graham figured the announcements in one recent issue were nothing unusual. Parents were reminded to bring birth certificates to the Junior Huskies' cheerleader sign-up. Dogs and cats would be vaccinated at the Live Oak Fire Station later that month. And every student would be issued an identification badge. "It is important that the badge be worn at all times during normal school hours," the newsletter read. "Thank you for your support."
But the support never came. Instead, Graham was confronted with fear, anger, and protest. The IDs were supposed to make it easy to take attendance. But parents discovered that the badges were capable of far more - they contained radio frequency identification chips, devices ordinarily reserved for tracking cows on a farm or mustard jars moving through a warehouse. In no time, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation got involved. Rumors and panic swelled. Within days, Graham was met at the school gates by a swarm of picketers, and film crews from as far away as Germany. "We were getting calls from reporters in Japan," he says. "The phone was ringing nonstop. The place turned into a zoo."
To this town of 2,885 people, the RFID badges came to represent the evil a new technology can bring. They were the incarnation of the surveillance society. Parents bridled at the idea of their kids being tracked. It was dehumanizing, an invasion of privacy, and potentially dangerous (someone might use RFID readers to target a child on the street). The radio signal might pose a health hazard. The tags, some suggested, might even be the biblical mark of the beast. Graham spent days holed up in his tiny office inside the white and gray one-story school building, trying to quell concern. The next newsletter assured parents that "the chip does not have any radioactive elements."
Graham - stocky, graying, bespectacled - calls himself a tech guy. Two years ago, he secured an $80,000 grant to outfit Brittan Elementary with new Dells and install a fiber backbone. Every teacher in the 600-student school has a desktop computer. Last year, the seventh graders made PowerPoint presentations on the science of roller coasters. So Graham was blindsided by the town's reaction. "I think concerns were exaggerated," he says. "All the chip did was take attendance! Technology is a tool for all of us to use. I don't like the Big Brother implications. That's not what it's all about."
Besides saving teachers time, Graham thought RFID could keep tabs on students and even track bathroom bullies and other troublemakers. Plus, he trusted the company behind the technology, a local outfit called InCom. Three of the four founders worked for schools in the area. And Graham had other incentives: In exchange for testing the system, InCom would donate to Brittan $2,500 plus royalties on future sales, and participating teachers would each receive a free PDA.
Two weeks after the uproar, InCom shut down the system at Brittan. But the rest of the country is fair game. When InCom took the technology to the American Association of School Administrators conference, more than 100 school districts said they were interested in the product, though no deals have been signed. Still, bringing the badges back to California might be tough. This spring, state senator Joe Simitian introduced a bill that would ban RFID from state-issued documents, including public school badges. Graham still can't see what all the fuss is about. "I'm pretty thickheaded," he says. "I haven't learned a lot."
- David Kushner
POSTS
>
Tagging Kids Like Cattle
