A couple of weeks ago my esteemed Network World columnist colleague Scott Bradner wrote about the minor furor surrounding Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, Calif.. To refresh your memory, this was the school that tried to get students to wear ID badges with embedded RFID chips.
The problem the school officials ran into didn’t have anything to do with technology, but rather their own naiveté when it came to “selling” the project to the community.
The project was proposed to the school by InCom, a company founded by two teachers to sell a system called InClass intended to automatically handle attendance taking, reporting and security.
I suspect that InCom was just as naive as the Brittan school board because there were so many flawed decisions in how this particular plan was conceived. Two major d’ohs come to mind: the foolish assertion that the system, as implemented, would improve security at the school, and the deployment of RFID sensors to monitor bathroom access.
Improved security is misleading because, while the school would know when students left buildings at unexpected times, without controlled access doors and the use of badges by all staff and students, it would do nothing to detect intruders.
As for the bathroom monitoring, there doesn’t seem to be a solid plan for how that data would be used, but there’s the obvious concern that bureaucratic zeal could have student biobreaks being tallied and documented.
While there are many aspects of this case that demonstrate a remarkable lack of thinking by people who are supposed to teach just that, there’s also a touch of a predictable reactionary response to the increased monitoring.
People’s concerns over what data is captured how that data will be used and interpreted and by whom are real and need addressing, but the scenarios people put forward to illustrate potential abuse tend to be extreme.
Take Bradner’s example: “Sounds like an ideal enabler for someone wanting to snatch a kid – just set up an RFID scanner beside the path in the woods, and you will be told when the target kid walks by with his ID tag in his bag.”
This is not a realistic risk. This is a pop culture boogeyman story. Any kidnapper who is that determined to take a child wouldn’t bother hanging out in the woods with an RFID scanner waiting for Little Red Riding Hood. He would be more direct.
Now, my intention is not to pick on Bradner (who did make some good points in his column), but rather to highlight that the problem is, once again, not with the technology but with the dumb people who fail to think about what they are doing with it.
My family would be happy to see our son’s school use such a system. We’d like the idea that the school was proactive about security and facilities management, but the I’s would have to be dotted and the T’s crossed when it came to the specifics of what, how and why the data from such a system would be used.
That said, there are two particular aspects of the system that could offer significant benefits. First, for large schools where there is a vandalism problem, RFID tracking of student IDs would make it easier to determine which students were in a problem location when the school incurred damage.
The second benefit is such systems could improve safety. For example,with student tracking in place, if a fire broke out the administration would know with a greater degree of certainty that no students were left in buildings.
Once again, we have an example of a smart technology that suffered from dumb implementation and a dumb, knee-jerk, negative response. Even so, this type of system will become commonplace in schools whether we like it or not. The only thing that will delay this trend will be how long it takes the vendors and adopters to stop being dumb about deployment and get smart about the hows and whys.
Tell me how and why at backspin@gibbs.com. Oh, by the way, check out Gearhead’s new blog called, not surprisingly, Gearblog, which can be found at www.nwfusion.com/weblogs/gearblog/.
Copyright © 2005 IDG Communications, Inc.
