A federal grant is giving money to California’s Contra Costa County to track preschool-age children using RFID chips. These RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are a device that tracks the exact location of the item the tag is on. This is used on items like CDs, electronic devices, clothing, and more. Helps prevent theft by activating the doors with alarm if someone were to walk out with an unpaid or non-“degaussed” item at checkpoints. These chips can also be used to track people’s behavior through their personal items. The George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California is the first school to adopt this new technology here in California. This controversial chip is not placed inside the human body, but is attached to a sweater that children will have to wear. These shirts will have an RFID chip inside and will be automatically registered by each school gate. This helps them cut costs and keep an “inventory” of the children.
A lot of controversy has arisen along with these chips. Although they seem harmless because they are worn outside the body, parents wonder why this type of security and surveillance is needed for preschoolers. This seems to be above and beyond any type of monitoring necessary for children under the age of five. What the county hopes to benefit from the chip is children’s movements for data collection, automatic attendance and tracking meal times. According to a county official; They are implementing this to reduce the cost of teachers manually tracking this information so they can better serve the needs of their students and have more time to teach them. The question is… how much time do you really save? Do the benefits of this device outweigh the risk and cost/maintenance? What if someone forgets their jersey at home or a chip starts to fail and the system crashes? Then it would do more harm than good, diverting teachers’ attention for an even longer period of time trying to fix the system and manually counting kids who forgot their t-shirt.
It is safe? That is a question from many parents whose children attend this school. After they approved this new program, they did not design an opt-out option for parents who were concerned about this. They have been using this RFID system for a long time in the UK and Japan with small children because they are faster and harder to track. They say it’s great for security, protecting children from being kidnapped and abducted. The other side of the argument says that because these trackers are only embedded in clothing, it would be easy for a child to remove their t-shirt or whatever item of clothing the RFID was attached to and then render it useless for security.
Are these chips a false sense of security for parents and school officials or do they really help teachers have more time to teach their children? Whatever your thoughts on this device, technology has come a long way and it’s only getting better.