Zev Porat

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips


AFP Photo/Philippe Marle
A school district in Texas came under fire earlier this year when it announced that it would require students to wear microchip-embedded ID cards at all times. Now students who refuse to be monitored say they are feeling the repercussions.
Since October 1, students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonia, Texas have been asked to attend class clasping onto photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification chips to keep track of each and every pupil’s personal location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to relax the rampant truancy rates devastating the state’s school and the subsequent funding they are failing to receive as a result, and pending the program’s success the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.
Some pupils say they are already seeing the impact, though, and it’s not one they are very anxious to experience. Students who refuse to walk the schoolhouse halls with a location-sensitive sensor in their pocket or around their neck are being tormented by instructors and being barred from participating in certain school-wide functions, with some saying they are even being turned away from common areas like cafeterias and libraries.
Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay, says educators have ignored her pleas to have her privacy respected and have told her she can’t participate in school elections if she doesn’t submit to the tracking program.
To Salon, Hernandez says subjecting herself to constant monitoring by way of wearing a RFID chip is comparable to clothing herself in the “mark of the beast.” When she reached out to WND.com to reveal the school’s response, though, she told them that she was threatened with exclusion from picking a homecoming king and queen for not adhering to the rules.

1 comment:

  1. They need to get rid of this system immediately. No school should ever force a child to wear a monitoring device. This is an invasion of privacy and I agree with the kids in that, it does appear to be a mark of the beast type system.

    Where are the parents? It is time to take this to the streets! They can get off their lazy butts and count students or install some type of fencing, or whatever it takes besides tagging kids with monitors.

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