Call It the ‘E-Z Pass’ for City’s Schools: Use of Swipe Cards, Scanners Grows

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The New York Sun

Call it the “E-Z Pass” of city schools.


Students once started the morning by raising their hands and saying, “Here,” but 388 city schools are now requiring them to swipe an electronic identification card that tracks attendance and logs when and where they are at school.


First introduced five years ago in the city’s most troubled schools, another 100 or so, including some of the most elite high schools, have signed on for the scanners in the past 18 months.


In addition to tracking attendance, the system can weed out students who are suspended and inform monitors about who must report to the dean’s office. The student information can be stored indefinitely.


“It will nag you by saying, ‘Hey, did you turn in your forms or are you late?’ Or it will nurture you by clapping if you have perfect attendance or singing ‘Happy Birthday,'” the executive director of Student Technology Management, William Morrison, said.


The company, which signed an exclusive deal with the city, also provides the scanners in some of the country’s most troubled school districts in cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Washington.


The computer also can be programmed to “applaud” members of the basketball team, for example, if they win a major tournament.


“We want it to be a deterrent but we want it to be positive as well,” Mr. Morrison instead.


Students at Brooklyn Technology High School were fuming this week when the scanners arrived.


“Whoever came up with this policy should be fired,” one student said yesterday as she stood outside with hundreds of others trying to get to their first-period classes.


The scanners appeared at Brooklyn Tech as tensions were simmering over the Bloomberg administration’s new random metal detector searches and increased efforts to ban cell phones.


On Monday morning, some students who didn’t know about the ID scanners turned around and went home after they saw hundreds of students packed onto the sidewalk outside of school. Students said they thought the police were there and would take away their cell phones.


While it only takes one-fifth of a second to scan the cards, the new system is causing long delays at the school with more than 4,000 students. The system requires students to swipe a card through a computer on a portable cart that flashes their photo on a screen. A school official must monitor each computer.


Yesterday morning, students grumbled about the new system and mostly complained about having to arrive 20 minutes earlier just to get inside the building. Students travel to the school in Fort Greene from all five boroughs, and many already wake up before the sun rises to make it to first period, which starts just before 8 a.m.


“The scanner is supposed to be for attendance, but we’re going to be late to class, so what’s the point?” a freshman, Jaely Jimenez, said. The delays have drastically decreased over the past few days.


At the elite Stuyvesant High School, where attendance is more than 95%, students were less than pleased when the scanners were introduced at the end of March.


After some members of the student union threatened to demonstrate on the steps of City Hall, the administration agreed that students would only have to swipe in the morning and not when they left the building for lunch.


“One of the concerns was that it was turning the school into a prison and that it was an invasion of our rights,” Andrew Saviano, the managing editor of the student newspaper, the Stuyvesant Spectator, said.


The assistant principal of technology services, Edward Wong, said the system makes it’s easier to monitor student attendance. Teachers still take attendance at every class and there are no plans to eliminate the attendance teacher position at city schools, according to the Department of Education.


“They said that the administration did not trust them – I could see that too, but it’s a safety issue. We don’t want kids going out during their nonlunch period,” he said.


Students at Stuyvesant also use the cards to check out library books and purchase cafeteria lunches. Other schools ask students to scan the cards when they enter the lunchroom or the gym to insure that they are not cutting class.


One of the promotional videos for School Technology Management includes a clip of a girl frowning after she was caught skipping a class.


At each school, the scanners cost about $30,000 to $70,000 in addition to $5,000 a year in maintenance costs.


A spokesman for the education department, Ketih Kalb, said the system makes it easier to track students and make them accountable. He said that is up to individual schools if they want to use the scanners.


Until five years ago, some schools used an older system to monitor building access. Students would swipe a card and either a red or green light would appear.


Asked about privacy concerns, Mr. Morrison said only the school has access to student information under the Student Technology Management system. While a credit card company once contacted the company to see if it would be interested in turning its product into a credit card (it said it is not), it said the Department of Defense has never tried to gain access to information for recruiting purposes.


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