Can Tracking ID Solve Texas School Truancy?

The simple answer is, yes, of course.  How such technology is implemented is a more complicated issue, however.

John Jay High School in San Antonio, Texas, caused a stir recently by implementing an ID technology that tracked students’ whereabouts, according to NBC News. School officials cited truancy as a major problem, and believed that this tracking device would solve it and thereby help the school recover lost state funding due to under-reported attendance.

Is this a solution that causes more problems than it solves? 

Privacy and safety are at the heart of the issue for some students, parents, and organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). After all, if administrators can track students, then so can predators intent on harming the students. Stalkers can find a way to track them well outside the school confines.

For me, this speaks to real quandaries of our society: Install freedom as if it were a birthright, and people are prone to see it as license to do what they want and secure what they need. Take that freedom away in the case of wrongdoing, however, and they have to realize there are boundaries within which they have to stay. They expect to be protected, yet rail at the stewards of freedom if they see the latter crossing those boundaries themselves.

I do not know if school officials have in fact crossed lines of civil rights. Still, these are real issues they have to answer to. In a way, technology is conceived in a moral vacuum. But operated under idealistic yet murky human affairs, technology becomes a lightning rod and the solutions it proposes raise questions.

Did a tracking solution work in similar circumstances? 

(image credit)

I used to work for a company that had a problem, and resorted to a measure, similar to John Jay High School. Many employees were coming in late, leaving early, and-or missing work altogether. New executives came on board, and in short order implemented a system that locked doors throughout the office complex and required special IDs for us to enter and exit. By end of the week, managers received tracking reports of our whereabouts and timings.

This company is outside the US, and there is no ACLU. So we cannot simply speak out to the media.  But this didn’t prevent us from communicating our displeasure.

For example, one time I was escorting a business visitor into our office, and had difficulty opening one door. A good colleague breezed in, and opened it for us. In passing, she smiled sardonically and said casually, “You see how much they trust us.” She was a manager herself, and a conscientious, hardworking one at that.

Was our truancy problem solved?

You see, in this country, local citizens have privileges that expat workers like me didn’t. That’s well and good, but expats are 80% of the population. So those local citizens are in fact the privileged few. In our case, expat managers often felt hesitant, if not outright unwilling, to discipline their local employees, for fear of reprisal coming from those privileged few.

Enter technology to the rescue.

I worked hard to build relationships with colleagues, managers, and executives at this company, and I was fortunate to have gained their respect and commendation. So, from personal observations and private conversations, I can say that employees who were prone to be ‘missing-in-action’ remained so. If their expat managers were not going to do anything about this, before Big-Brother technology, what reason or reassurance did they have to act on tracking reports?

Moreover, I can say this: Engagement is a measure of employee motivation and commitment. One time our company scores were lower than international averages, and lower still about two years later. So the solution that executives implemented apparently were not working. Why? Because they failed to get at the root of the problem. In essence, theirs was a high-tech ‘band-aid,’ applied merely to symptoms of the problem. What’s worse, it didn’t eliminate the symptoms!

Is there an alternative for John Jay High School?

Only time will tell how well their ID tracking system will work. But there must be so many ways to ‘game’ or breach this, that it’s hard for me to imagine that it will work. Moreover, the manner by which school officials communicated and implemented this looks to be, at minimum, a public relations nightmare. For civil organizations to say that this system is “dehumanizing” is serious.

I wonder how much officials probed into the root causes of the truancy problem and, more importantly, how well and how completely they’ve grasped these. In the battle on civil rights, this problem seems to have slipped out of the radar. Did they carefully scenario-plan their ID tracking system, and anticipate this media uproar and make contingency plans?

I wonder if they could’ve targeted only the problematic students, thus leaving the otherwise conscientious, high-performing students alone. Perhaps after failed efforts to redress their truancy, officials could’ve installed micro-chips in their IDs as a disciplinary measure. Within the purvey of school policy and civil rights, they fully engage and inform these students' parents, but otherwise keep communications discreet. Officials can then remove the micro-chips, once the students demonstrate responsible behavior.

The media could still catch wind of such a measure, especially if a couple of those truant students and-or their parents approach reporters. But then if they do, they’d be exposing their truancy to the public. I doubt they would do that.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD