Tucson Schools Considering RFID BusPass

The radios contain GPS receivers and are linked to a wireless metropolitan area network made up of cell transmitter stations that Gateway operates, according to Jon Rowley, the company's president and co-owner. The radio on each bus transmits its location, the GPS data and the tag manifest over the 218 MHz band, to the cell transmitter stations around Tucson that make up the network. This data is then forwarded to BusPass software running at a central location. The software keeps a record of all tag transactions and GPS positions and notifies parents of arriving or truant students. It can be used in combination with interrogators installed on the school grounds, as an automated attendance-taking system for teachers. The information gathered in the software can also be used to locate buses in case of an emergency.

Initially, says Bill Ball, TUSD's transportation director, the district was looking for a means of just tracking the buses, so as to know where they were at all times and whether drivers were speeding. Officials were intrigued, however, by the ability to know, as well, which students were on each bus, especially if this could help them locate children quickly.

Still, Ball stresses, TUSD had not yet made any decisions about deploying RFID or any other tracking technology. "We want to be really careful and make sure we get input from parents and students" before deploying anything permanently, he says.
Whether tracking students' whereabouts makes them safer or just vulnerable to privacy is being fiercely debated among many schools, parents and privacy advocates. An elementary school in Sutter, Calif., started testing a passive RFID tracking system for automated attendance-taking early this year, for example, but the program was shut down after parental opposition and involvement from the American Civil Libterties Union (ACLU) and other privacy-rights groups drew national media attention to the small town.

Enterprise Charter School, in Buffalo, N.Y., deployed an automated attendance-taking system in 2003 in which students present an RFID ID card to a kiosk with an integrated reader. The high costs of replacement IDs, however, have rendered the system too expensive to maintain, according to Mark Walter, chief technical officer at the school.

"Kids are losing the cards," says Walter, or the students are ruining them. "They're being put through washing machines, kids are chewing on them." Consequently, the school is phasing out RFID and moving to a different attendance-taking system in which each student must find their photo on a computer screen and click on it as they enter a classroom.