RFID School Tracking Badges Scrapped In Texas

After much ballyhoo over its supposed ability to improve student safety and attendance, a controversial program to electronically track children in a Texas school district is now being deemed a failure. A spokesman for San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District confirmed with IBTimes Tuesday that the district is scrapping its much-maligned program, which uses RFID-enabled identification badges to track students and monitor attendance. Pascual Gonzalez, the district’s executive director of communications, said the program will not proceed past the one-year pilot stage, not so much because of legal or privacy concerns, but because it had virtually no effect on student attendance.