It’s ridiculous implementation of technology like this that drive up school budgets.
This was exactly my thought when I first read this article a couple of days ago.
Children can be sneaky little bastards. You’d think school administrators would know that.
They’re not that sneaky, they’re pretty useless when it comes to being criminals. They think they are sneaky, but they’re really not.
And best of all, they will turn on each other very quickly.
At least that’s my experience of dealing with primary school kids…secondary probably have a modicum more sneakiness, but they’re still pretty dumb.
I’ve got kids to confess to stuff that, if they just kept their mouths shut, they would have been able to get away scot-free.
I think it’s a good idea. We are becoming more solitary, as we watch TV, browse the internet, obsess over our phones and read our tablets. Fewer and fewer people know their neighbors, and in general we’ve become more transient. We need to keep better tabs on our kids because the traditional methods are kind of becoming obsolete.
After paying for this system, there won’t be any budget for field trips. Problem solved!
Why doesn’t Texas just fake their roll call reports like they do with their drop out reports?
I’m shocked that the thread has gotten this far without anyone saying “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”
It’s a good way to learn about their migratory habits.
Mea culpa. It was 7:30 in the morning.
Apologies.
Heheh, s’okay..done it myself too many times.
See, I don’t think they need to track the students’ movements for this system to work. You could have a much cheaper system that is a simple barcode reader in each classroom. As the child enters the class, they scan their card showing that they were in attendance that day.
The barcode reader could be used in the library and the lunch line just like the rfid tags are used.
We are talking about middle school here. I would think that, as with my primary aged kids, if there was an unexcused absence, the parents would be contacted. I would think that this, in itself would mean that your attendance matched with who was in class.
The way it is done at my kids’ (admittedly primary) school is that there is a system you need to phone or log into on the net and excuse them. If they are not excused this way, they will phone all the contact numbers on their list until the child is located. (They wait until 15 minutes after the last bell in case they were just late for school.)
If a child arrives after the last bell, they MUST go to the office and sign in before they head to class. The secretary then notes (in the same computer system) that they have arrived and gives them a ticket that allows them into class. In order for them to leave school grounds during school hours, they must leave with a responsible adult and the child must leave via the office (where the secretary notes that they have left).
I imagine the web-based part of the attendance system cost some money to implement but even before that, the rest of the system was in play (using paper day-to-day which was input into an excel spreadsheet the next day).
How on earth can you run a school which is liable for these kids during the day and not even know what kids are there?
Hey, man, I’m gonna ditch English today. If I give you my card, can you scan in for me?
Actually, it would probably work just as well if I gave you a photocopy of the barcode.
I lost a 9 year old, in school, and it was dreadful.
He asked to be excused to go to the toilet, so I let him (x). Ten minutes later I realised he hadn’t come back, so I send another boy (y) to go check the toilets. Y comes back and says “X isn’t there sir, I called his name and there was no one there”.
I immediately round up a posse of adults to commence a search for him.
After 5 minutes of checking various public places, colleague rechecks the toilets. X is in the toilet. I gave him a dressing down, as did the other adults, turns out he was having a massive dump and was embarrassed… I was really worried though, we had had a spate of kids doing runners and the police were getting fed up of bringing in the helicopter and dogs to search for them.
Now the school gates are magnetically locked until 3:20, so escape is harder (the older ones can reach the release, but at least the tiny children can’t).
This is why one of my teachers claimed to never mark a student absent. He said he didn’t want the school to lose money because deadbeats didn’t want to go to class.
From the second article they say they take attendance at 9:35 and if kids come in later then they are not counted as in attendance.
Sounds like if they fixed how they take attendance this wouldn’t be a problem. I mean why can’t the teacher send a late student to the office to let them know they arrived late? When I was in school each teacher in each class took attendance. How the hell are they doing it?
Sounds reasonable, until that is, a firefighter dies trying to rescue a kid who was never there!
How would a firefighter get access to attendance logs in a burning building?
I know one person said that in their school all the roll calls are entered into computers in real time. Is this common? I guess I’m thinking back to when I went to school and the teachers did it on paper and then sent the paper down to the office at the end of the day.
If it is common, does the log get sent to the firehouse or someplace where firefighters can download it?
If it is not common, do firefighters page through individual teacher’s attendance logs when they enter a burning building? How would they know if a student has gotten outside on their own?
Our registers are taken either on paper, which is brought out by the office staff for the class teacher to call the register at the fire muster point; or, as at my last school, we had class registers on iPads which accompanied the class wherever they went on school grounds (paper off site).
The class teacher must confirm that all children are present or accounted for, so a false “present” mark could risk the life of a firefighter.
And they can’t do that with the current equipment, why?
This is just laziness. It’s not that hard to keep track of children who come in late. Every school ever has pulled this off without expensive devices.
This is a state so hard up for money that they’ve eliminated teachers’ ability to bargain for pay increases. Why in the world are they wasting money on crap like this? Why not use this money to help stop them having the second highest drop out rate in the country?
And I doubt this school could handle giving papers over to someone. If keeping track of latecomers is so hard it needs an invasive solution, do you know how hard it would be to put all that together and hand it to someone else?
Just how big are their classes, anyway? There’s no substitute for an actual teacher who knows the students (or a substitute teacher with a good sub plan and rosters).
I work in the office of a public middle school. Our student information system (which is pathetically outdated at this point and which we hope will be replaced in the next year or so) works the way perfectparanoia describes. Teachers mark attendance in their computers at the beginning of the class period - every class period, ideally - and the information comes up on the school’s system. The attendance secretary is responsible for entering excuses for the children whose parents have called in, and an automated system calls parents’ contact numbers (and sends emails if they’ve provided addresses). The secretary runs a report that shows which children are absent every class period and another that shows whether any teachers have failed to take attendance. If a teacher, usually a sub, doesn’t have computer access, he or she sends the attendance in on paper and we enter it in the office. When students come in late, they have to report to the office, sign in, and get a note to get into class. When they do that, if the teacher’s paying attention, the child is marked tardy instead of absent. Sometimes teachers aren’t paying attention, of course, and the student looks like he or she was absent that class period. It’s the student’s responsibility to get that cleared up later (usually the next day, when the parent calls to find out why they got the absence call that evening). Naturally, some of the students have figured out that they can sign in at the office and then dawdle around on the campus before going to class. This is where adult attention comes in.
If (when?) we get our system upgrade, the teacher’s rosters will show pictures of the students and, if the teacher’s a good one, a seating chart. If the school system springs for the equipment, we’ll be able to scan barcodes on the students’ ID cards that will give a staff member information about the student’s schedule and whether he or she has been marked absent. A student wouldn’t be able to scan another kid’s ID because we staff members are generally sighted and can tell who the kids are. There’s really no substitute for alert, involved adults in any system.
The big problem I have is that this is a waste of money. ID badges? OK, why not, we had them when I was in high school a decade ago (there was a bit of a fuss because we JROTC cadets did not want to wear the lanyards with our uniforms cause it looked tacky. The solution ended up being for one of the school stafers to find a box of ID clips somewhere so we could just clip them to a pocket on our tops).
That said, the RFID badge doesn’t do anything the teacher shouldn’t be doing already, and if you want to scan the IDs, barcode readers would be much cheaper all-around.
Alternately, just have the hip cool cat kids use their iBerries and Blackdroids and Andphrones and “Check In” to the schoolhouse on Facebook.