RFID, Privacy, Civil Discourse and the New Canaan Board of Education

What is it about the end of August that fosters the suspension of common sense in New Canaan?  A year ago, President Obama’s exhortation to the nation’s school children to work harder and take personal responsibility for their education was denounced as a secret plot to indoctrinate our kids into godless communism, or worse, I guess, Muslim socialism.  This year, the willingness of the Board of Education to even consider how a new technology might be used within schools is suddenly the equivalent of tattooing ID numbers on students’ arms and turning our schools into tools of a totalitarian state.

For the record, at its last meeting August 18th, the New Canaan Board of Education was asked by a local technology firm if it might be interested in participating in a National Science Foundation-funded project to investigate how a new technology might be used by school districts. This technology is a new, longer range radio frequency (RF) identification chip.  Such a chip might be imbedded in ID cards; it could also be attached to assets like library books, laptop computers, and video cameras.  This new RF technology (referred to as “Dash 7”) has a range of up to 1,000 meters inside buildings, and up to 2,000 meters outdoors.

As the Board’s discussion (which, as is every other regular meeting of the Board of Ed, was broadcast live on Channel 78 and is replayed on Thursdays and Mondays) quickly revealed, Board members immediately grasped the privacy risks associated with the deployment of such a technology.  We also recognized some potential benefits this technology might bring: cutting down on theft (a non-trivial issue in our schools,) the ability to quickly locate a special needs student in an emergency, and helping maintain the integrity of the High School’s open campus policy were among examples cited.  And as the dad of three NCHS graduates whose kids have all participated in nationally-funded research at the universities they have attended, I opined that regardless of whether or not anything practical or commercially viable came out of the effort, the opportunity for students to participate in an “official” research project could be a worthwhile learning experience in its own right.

At the conclusion of its discussion, the Board decided that there might indeed be some possible utility in this new technology for school districts in general and New Canaan in particular, and gave its permission for the administration to  -are you ready? – have further discussions about applying for a grant that would at no cost to the school district be used to test potential applications of this new technology in schools in ways that would need the subsequent approval of the board before proceeding.  Call me naïve, but to me it seems like this is still pretty far away from instituting a policy requiring the mandatory subcutaneous injection of ID chips into all kindergarteners.

New Canaan Public Schools is a high-achieving school district, one of the best performing districts in the state and in the country.  In my opinion (and not speaking for the Board here), we get to stay that way by exercising leadership in all aspects of our district’s performance: pushing the envelope, not being satisfied with the status quo, celebrating our successes while always probing how we can do better.  You don’t get to demonstrate leadership by waiting on the sidelines watching what other people do and then trying to copy them.  This applies to our administration, and it applies to our board.  Not every idea discussed is a good one; Board members don’t always agree,   and even after careful discussion we might not always get it 100% correct (elementary school district redistricting back in 2000 comes to mind.)  But we have to be able to identify, evaluate and test different ways to improve, do things better, and do new things, even if they are unvetted and potentially controversial.  Last I checked, that’s how progress gets made.

I have no issue with people having opinions on such things; indeed I think I and other board members welcome hearing from people about their opinons and concerns.  What is a little disappointing is how quickly otherwise rational people are ready to suspend disbelief and assume the worst based on a 15 second clip in a blog posted somewhere (the Drudge Report? Come on.)   We live here.  Our kids go, or went, to school here.  We broadcast our meetings live on TV.  Our phone numbers are in the student directories.   Our emails are posted on the district web site (www.newcanaan.k12.ct.us).  If you hear or read something that doesn’t quite make sense, instead of sounding the alarm and raising the militia, maybe you could just give one of us a call?

(Jim Kucharczyk is serving his third term on the New Canaan Board of Education.  The opinions expressed herein are his own and not necessarily reflective of the New Canaan Board of Education.)