| http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_20010519.html
Grant to take swipe at bar-code ID cards By Sandy Louey Bee Staff Writer (Published May 19, 2001) Students at a Sacramento junior high school will soon start carrying ID cards with computer bar codes so officials can track their attendance throughout the day, whether they are getting on a school bus, entering a classroom or buying lunch in the cafeteria.The system approved this week by the Grant Joint Union High School District will begin this summer at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School. State and local officials believe Grant is the first district in the state to try such an identification program, though some large East Coast school systems use similar technology. The benefits, Grant officials say, will be increased attendance as well as improved campus security. "If we don't have kids in class, we can't teach them anything," said Jim Griffis, the district's education technology coordinator. Under the pilot program, bus drivers and teachers will use hand-held computers to scan the photo ID cards as students get on buses or come into classrooms. Students also will have to use the cards when buying cafeteria lunches or checking out library books. Officials said the system will let educators note unexcused absences instantly, so calls to parents can be made almost immediately. Bus drivers will be able to tell right away whether students are riding the correct bus, and by using the system in the cafeteria and library, officials believe students will be less likely to lose or forget their cards. Grant teachers now take roll manually, reporting absences on fill-in bubble sheets that then are fed through a main computer. Parents are notified after the end of the school day, but computer problems sometimes result in absences being processed days after a student missed school, officials said. The district, which has about 12,300 students in grades seven through 12, has as many as 450 unexcused absences each day, officials said. Truancy rates can affect the amount of money the district receives from the state because funding formulas are based on attendance. Yolanda Guajardo, mother of a Martin Luther King Jr. seventh-grader, said the ID cards are a good idea because parents will know much more quickly if their children skipped school. "Too many kids are getting away with too much nowadays," she said. The cards also will make it easy to spot students who don't belong on campus, said Angie Turner, another parent of a seventh-grader. "It will better identify the kids who go there," she said. Not only have card-swipe student identification systems been adopted in other districts around the nation, identification cards are the norm in workplaces today, said Peter Blauvelt, president of the National Alliance for Safe Schools. "You can hardly go into any business today without wearing badges. It's part of the culture in which we live," Blauvelt said. "It tells us who you are." Some of the districts already using computerized ID systems are in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. New York City schools will start using the system this fall, and pilot programs will be launched in Atlanta and Chicago. School districts are turning to such systems because they reduce paperwork and provide a better tool to fight truancy, said John Amatruda, president of School Technology Management, an ID-system manufacturer. "It's not Big Brother. It's saving money. It's being more accountable," he said. These systems might be more convenient, but they also could reduce the personal connection between students and teachers, said Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "It means teachers don't have to know who their students are," she said. But with the pilot program at Martin Luther King Jr., teachers will be responsible for making sure that a class's physical head count matches its electronic one. When it was proposed a few months ago, the ID system drew support from the teachers union, which said it should improve attendance and prevent students from trying things like slipping into classrooms where substitutes are filling in. The hand-held computers also will give administrators and teachers immediate access to students' schedules, parent-contact information and health data -- the same information already in the student database. Detention slips also could be printed immediately, Griffis said. The pilot program is scheduled to begin during the summer session so that kinks can be worked out before it is launched for the full school year. Martin Luther King Jr. has about 300 students for summer school and about 900 students during the regular academic year. The University of California, Davis, through an existing partnership with the district, will evaluate the project. Any decision on whether to expand it to other schools would be made later, district officials said. The money for the project comes from a $207,000 federal technology grant that the district received with help from Rep. Doug Ose, R-Sacramento. The district's contribution to the project is $90,823. |
