Schools lose things all the time. Textbooks. Laptops. Students.
Now — thanks to Secure RF, a Westport company — administrators can track anything they want. Gone are the days when valuable resources walk out the door — including kids and teachers.
According to BrickhouseSecurity.com, a blog covering all things surveillance, Secure RF will use a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to test radio frequency identification (RFID) tags — aka chips.
Embedded in a laptop — or student ID or backpack — RFID scans a room “to figure out what’s there and what’s missing.”
The technology allows school administrators to “take a quick count of who is in class and who’s not, who walked out the front door, or who walked into the library.”
And guess which school system is thinking of testing the concept?
Gotcha! Not Westport.
Currently, the program is limited to volunteer students and parents.
As expected, not everyone is leaping onto the RFID bandwagon.
A school board member said: “I can perceive parents would have an issue with tracking kids through the school and through town.”
BrickhouseSecurity.com noted, “if the chip is in an ID card or backpack, high school students could easily ditch these items, rendering the system somewhat ineffective… It seems like this program is primarily targeting younger children and assets.”
High-tech efficiency — or Big Brother run wild? Whatever the answer, Fairfield County is involved in both the problem and its solution.