This is a really odd story, wanted some opinions on it - an independent high school district in San Antonio, Texas implemented a policy whereby all students have to wear an ID badge with a radio tracker in it, the idea being that it would be easier for record keeping which in turn fills the school coffers based on student numbers. Wired.com has some more on the device itself:
Anyway, a student refuses to wear the ID badge citing scripture that it was against her religion - seeing it as the ‘mark of the beast’ described in the Book of Revelation. The school says if you want to attend, you have to wear the badge, and expels her.
Now it’s a matter for the courts - on religious grounds:
There are a lot of parents on the Dope - how would you feel if the school you sent your child to began to implement such a policy (as mentioned in the links, more schools are considering it)? And more importantly, is it even constitutional? Regardless of the findings on religious freedom, would it not breach the 5th Amendment? Say a crime is committed on campus and the tracker puts your child in the area. They’re automatically a suspect even if they’re completely innocent. What’s going on out there?
No. The Fifth Amendment’s protections reach testimonial evidence, not all evidence. You can be required to produce papers from your desk, even if the papers show you planned and executed a mortgage fraud, but could not be required to testify and answer questions about your role in the mortgage fraud.
Same concept here: the tracker does not create testimonial evidence. Its use does not violate the Fifth Amendment.
As a parent I wouldn’t care at all. If my workplace implemented a similar program I wouldn’t care at all. I’m pretty sure if I was a suspect in some major crime, my cell phone GPS records could be used to find out where I was at, say, 2:00 PM on August 2nd, 2012.
I guess I stand corrected, said the man in the orthopaedic shoes. So what’s to stop the process being implemented in a wider capacity - say, if all citizens were required to wear a tracking device and not just students (in a school that receives state funding, no less) - could we count on the privacy interpretation of the 4th Amendment to strike it down?
I’m not up to date on Satan’s techniques, but I’ll just point out that just about every school today already has a “tracking system,” which is a teacher holding a a roster, who checks off the name of each student presence during a particular time at a particular place throughout the school day.
The only difference here is that if the school has periods of time when students may roam about the campus freely, it theoretically can indicate exactly where the student goes during those periods. (This is usually just high schools.)
IOW, most schools already attempt to account for each child’s presence at any time. Presumably an RFID system would also be able to indicate when a student is actually off campus and unaccounted for, or in some unidentified “dead zone” on campus. So the biggest losers in this system are the stoners, because it would be pretty simple to write an algorithm that would identify exactly where they’re lighting up in real time.
Yes. As much as the idea viscerally bothers me, it’s hard to argue that the school has a right to track students, but they don’t have the right to do a real good job.
I hope it makes it. Not only because of the religious reasons, but because it cost a lot of money to do what can already be done much more cheaply as stated above. These aren’t even attached to the kids, so they can and will carry one that belongs to a buddy to cover for him. Just like blocking the Internet at school, kids see knew technology as a challenge, even if the wouldn’t have infringed before.
Honestly, I’m rather surprised a place in Texas only has one student who objects. I can’t imagine the idea even getting off the ground here. The eventual Mark of the Beast is an accepted fact here. I figured it would be even worse in Texas.
As for me, personally, I’d actually feel better if this was in the hands of law enforcement. I trust them more than any public school, since the latter has a basic opt out clause to freedom of speech for anything that “disrupts the learning environment.” And it’s used so often that I and most kids seriously thought that the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to minors.
And I say that as someone who is on record as not caring that much about privacy–in general I think it is overvalued to irrational degree. But monitoring my every movement by someone not bound by law to keep it secret? Hell no.
And that’s not a contradiction. The school has a vested interest in knowing whether I’m present on campus, and whether I’m in class. It does not have a vested interest in knowing my exact location. The only extra thing this gives them is information they don’t need. I mean, come on. You’ve already got the cameras in every classroom with facial recognition.
Almost certainly yes. In Jones v. US, the Supreme Court held that a police tactic of installing a GPS monitor on a car, without a warrant, was a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Scalia wrote the majority opinion, saying that the installation of the GPS was a trespass; Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Sotomayor joined. Alito concurred but said he’d also find it violated a person’s reasonable expectation of privavcy, which reasoning was joined by Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan.
So by my count you have at least five votes for the ID card scheme discussed above violating the Katz “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard: Alito, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan.
You can’t really analogize the privacy rights of students at school to those of adults (or kids) someplace else. Schools stand in loco parentis, and as a result are granted much broader latitude to control the activities of kids at school than, say, the police, outside school.
From Tinker v. Des Moines:
[QUOTE=SCOTUS]
First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years.
<snip>
On the other hand, the Court has repeatedly emphasized the need for affirming the comprehensive authority of the States and of school officials, consistent with fundamental constitutional safeguards, to prescribe and control conduct in the schools
[/QUOTE]
For the record, I think this plan is a solution in search of a problem, but I don’t think it’s unconstitutional.
My school has security cameras in all the hallways and on the exterior of the building. This has been effective in identifying students involved in misdeeds on campus. I agree that RFID would be too easy to circumvent.
A school district. Public schools in Texas are organized and administered by “Independent School Districts,” or “ISD’s”. They are independent in the sense that the districts are not bound to city or county governance or boundaries, but the school is just a regular public high school.
I’m still trying to understand how it was against the childs religious beliefs - how was the id badge (something I assume they already had sans RFID chip) a “mark of the beast” ?
I don’t see any objection to the badges, personally: They only track the students while they’re on campus, and while they’re on campus, their locations are in fact the school’s business. If they were tracking where the students went outside of school hours, that’d be problematic, but they’re not.
As for this particular student’s objection, well, I think it’s ridiculous, but I also think that it should be easy enough for the school, student, and parents to come to an agreement on some mutually-agreeable accommodation. It’s not like the student’s religion is requiring him to sacrifice live chickens on the school grounds, or something.
I am a public high school teacher in Texas and I oppose this measure. First of all make no mistake, the real reason administration is so concerned with tracking students on campus is funding. Attendance rates and finding are tied together, therefore increasing and proving attendance levels are one of the chief concerns of any public school administrator.
I oppose the measure because: 1. It is expensive. 2. It won’t help track troublesome students. The psychopaths that terrorize our public high schools have the wherewithal to lose the damn badge before committing their sundry crimes, and the screwups will just lose the stupid badges the first week of school anyway. 3. It is yet another step towards institutionalizing our students rather than interacting with them as developing adults. For all the talk in education about preparing students for the “real world” our high schools resemble prisons more than any sort of professional or college environment they will likely encounter. This is just another step in the direction of putting control over education in our schools.