Student-tracking treating children like “cattle” plan dropped

Monitoring of Middletown students is opposed
01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, January 9, 2008
By Meaghan WimsJournal Staff Writer

MIDDLETOWN — The Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union is calling on the Middletown School Department to drop its planned pilot program of a student-tracking system that the ACLU says would treat children like “cattle” and violate their privacy.
The school district this month will test the Mobile Accountability Program, or MAP, which will place GPS tracking devices in two school buses and attach radio-frequency identification labels to the backpacks of the 80 or so Aquidneck Elementary School students who ride those buses. School administrators will then be able to monitor — in real-time, via an online map of Middletown at MAPIT’s secure Web site — the progress of those buses and their passengers as the children enter and exit the buses.
MAP is designed to improve transportation safety and efficiency and the pilot would last for the rest of the school year, after which school officials will determine whether to expand the program to the district’s entire bus fleet.
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