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Schools Use Technology to Track Exact Whereabouts of Buses and Each Child

By Bruce Carton

Back in my day, we had to walk to school barefoot, in the snow -- uphill both ways. That made our feet cold. Then the kids started riding on those newfangled "buses," which seemed like a good thing until parents realized there was a 45-minute period when they did not know the exact whereabouts of their children. Now even that problem has been solved, thanks to GPS technology and identification cards that are now issued to all elementary school bus riders in places like Palos Heights, Ill. The Chicago Tribune reports (via Consumerist) that in Palos Heights, school officials have assigned ID tags to 400 students in preschool through 5th grade. Each child clips the card to their book bag, and the card/child is then "logged in" upon boarding the bus. This "allows a transportation supervisor sitting miles away to track when and where each student in Palos Heights School District 128 stepped on and off the bus." The location of the bus itself is also known to the transportation supervisor through GPS technology. The combination of the students' ID cards and the buses' GPS system allows: transportation director Barbara Lynch [to] check when a student boards or exits a...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on September 02, 2010 (boomark / email).