Editorial: It’s wrong to track high schoolers with chips in ID cards

Most high school students would probably not describe attending classes and football games as particularly Orwellian experiences. But at John Jay High School in San Antonio, “Big Brother” seems to be looming nearer as a student has been suspended for refusing to wear an ID card implanted with a radio frequency identification tracking chip.

According to an article on Wired, Texas high school sophomore Andrea Hernandez refused to wear the school-mandated ID card on the grounds that it violates her religious beliefs and privacy. After much protesting, she has been allowed to return to school with a modified, chip-free card.

The Texas magnet school has cited several reasons for starting a “smart ID” system. Administrators claim they are primarily hoping to use the cards to decrease truancy and gain more attendance-linked revenue from the state.

With chips in students’ IDs, attendance is not just monitored by teachers calling names in homeroom — if students are in the building but not in homeroom, then they can still be counted for attendance, and it could cut down on skipped classes. They have also made the “smart ID cards” to allow students to quickly purchase lunch and tickets for extracurricular activities and to swipe into the library and other common areas in the school.

Suspending a student for refusing to wear a chip-infused ID card is obviously problematic, especially because her refusal stemmed in part from religious beliefs. Schools should do their best to treat their students as individuals, and Hernandez’s protest of holding signs that said, “I am not a number,” was fitting.

The school’s policy of counting students by chips in ID cards similarly reduces students to numbers. While taking attendance in person and not being 100 percent certain of every students’ location might mean inevitable loitering by the art rooms, these situations should be handled on an individual basis, and not by tracking students’ movement throughout the school.

While the school’s official website denies that the chips present a privacy concern — they only monitor students’ locations while they are on school grounds during the school day, and the school certainly has a right to know where students are at these times — the idea of putting tracking chips on students is still upsetting. High school students are taught to take increased responsibility for their actions in preparation for the adult world, and tracking their movement throughout a school undermines that lesson.

Also, chipping students to gain more revenue makes students uncomfortably responsible for the school’s funding. Making the discussion about attendance in school about receiving increased funding reduces the value of the institution as a place of learning. If students are told that the main reason that their attendance is valuable is for the school to get more money, then how can a school reasonably maintain an intellectual atmosphere?

However, the idea of a smart ID card is not all bad, and it’s easy to see the use for increased efficiency in buying lunches or football tickets and checking out library books with an ID card — much in the same way Pitt IDs work.

However, all of these convenient changes do not have to — and should not — include a location tracker, and above all, anything done with students’ personal information or data should be done only with their and their parents’ consent.