HB239 was introduced to Missouri senate in January 2013 by Senator Ed Emery stating:
“No school district shall require a student to use an identification device that uses radio frequency identification, or similar technology, to identify the student, transmit information regarding the student, or monitor or track the student” now has an amendment by Senator Curls, in April 2013, that reads:
“technology, or similar technology, unless such identification device is used solely for the purposes of student safety or student security.”
Given how Oregon’s HB2386 was flipped from not tagging children with RFID to the bill endorsing the RFID tagging of children, maybe this is how legislature will trend with RFID tracking children in the USA.
On the back of the Sandy Hook massacre, Ekahau, via Rapid Emergency Response, supplies wfif RFID to Skyview High School and is marketing its RFID to schools on the back of this Delaware bill, HB33, requiring each public school to have panic buttons.
RFID in Northside Independent School District, NISD, in San Antonio was scrapped last week as it did not improve attendance – a valuable lesson for the RFID industry. Dangling the carrot of increased funding for NISD on the back of promised improved student attendance was attractive enough for the school district to buy into RFID but when the technology did not deliver it was rightly scrapped.
The next round of RFID will be marketed at schools selling us increased student safety. As the Skyview High School RFID vendor’s Rapid Emergency Response (original link now broken so here is the Webarchive link) website states, “we spend billions as a nation protecting our banks, cars and homes. When will we do the same for our children?” A good question indeed from a company selling RFID systems to schools.
What is the cost of our children’s privacy, that we are willing to sell for their security?
Overview video of the Skyview RF tracker system.
Against RFID in schools 