Loss of Privacy

From msnbc news:

In a bid to set parents’ nerves at ease, a southwest suburban school district has become one of the first in the state to begin tracking students riding buses to and from school each day with Global Positioning System and Radio Frequenty Identification technology.

Palos Heights School District 128 had previously been using ZPass, a GPS technology provided by Seattle-based Zonar Systems, to track the buses.  But now the district is outfitting students’ backpacks with a luggage tag-sized unit that logs when the student steps on and off the bus.

And this will surely work because kids never forget their backpacks and always take them home from school. Children will just get a friend to hold their bags, thus circumventing the system. Once the kid gets off the bus, they aren’t tracked anymore. Good luck finding your child then.

For all you parents that worry far too much, stop worrying. Your kids aren’t in any more danger now than they were 40 years ago. Allowing this intrusive crap into your lives only coddles your children into accepting being tracked as normal for the rest of their lives. You’re not helping.

The entire freshman class at Carvers Bay High School in South Carolina has been enrolled in JROTC classes. The principal, who happens to also be a retired Navy man, says that the Marine JROTC fulfills the physical education requirement at the Freshman Academy.

But Charles Holloway, the parent of a freshman student at Carvers Bay, said he did not want his son in that program and when he asked that his son be taken out, his son was put in a class by himself.Holloway said he feels his son was being punished for not wanting to take part in that class.

Holloway said the JROTC class simply showed up on his son’s schedule in place of gym class and he did not receive any information about the class or how to get his son out of it.

According to the South Carolina Department of Education, high school students must take at least one credit of physical education in order to graduate. ROTC can also fill that requirement.

While it’s fine to allow ROTC to fulfill the P.E. requirement, making it mandatory is not necessary. There are many students and parents who object to forced military classes and presumed recruitment.

Neal said he initiated the program because studies show that students in leadership programs are more likely to stay in school and graduate. He said so far the program has had an “extremely high positive response,” but “any parent who did not want their son or daughter [to participate] has the opportunity to participate in other elective classes.”

If this were true, then why did he require students to enroll in the classes to begin with. Why not inform them of their choices and let the students and their parents decide whether to take ROTC or regular P.E. classes?

Neal said letters and fliers about Ninth Grade Academy were sent to parents. The class is an elective and students had the option to select other programs as well, he said, but noted that the ninth grade class was “enrolled” in the program.

You can’t have it both ways. It’s either an elective or it’s not. You can’t claim that the class is optional when you’ve forced an entire class of students to enroll in ROTC. This case is similar to many privacy issues found on the internet. The individual finds themselves in a situation where they must take the action and opt-out of what is unwanted. In the mean time, students might feel peer pressure to stay in the ROTC program so that they aren’t ostracized by those who choose to stay in. given the fact that the principal is a former military man, students may also feel as if they must stay in ROTC or face punishment later from the principal who is a huge authority figure in a school.

Adding students to an ROTC program without properly informing parents is irresponsible and bordering on criminal. The US military is a volunteer force. There is no valid reason to make students feel like they have to enroll in a pre-military program.

While many people are comparing this to beginnings of the Hitler Youth movement, and there are similarities, there is also concern as to whether such a move by the principal is even legal. Until there is legal action, every freshman should challenge this action and return to regular P.E. instead.

The New Canaan school district in Connecticut is toying with the idea of electronically tracking their students.

New Canaan already has GPS and video cameras on all their buses, but is only exploring being part of an experiment testing such tracking. Under the program, students would be carrying an ID card with radio frequency strips. It pinpoints a student’s location, be it in the classroom or off grounds in nearby downtown.

As usual, the company that would provide the tags has brought out the old standby that they would be useful in an emergency.

“In an emergency they would be able to take attendance and know which students were where in a matter of seconds,” he explained.

As has been pointed out numerous times before, these devices are easily defeated. This idea isn’t new and it will fail.

Go tell your representatives to stand up for fact-based education.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the Texas State Board of Education’s moves to impose educational standards into its textbooks intended to indoctrinate Texas public school students with a telling of U.S. history that is based in extremist religious ideology.

You’ve probably also heard about some of the more jaw-dropping proposed changes to the curriculum, such as booting Thomas Jefferson off of a list of influential thinkers in place of explicitly religious figures, and the totally fabricated assertion that our system of government is based specifically on the laws of Moses. This comes from the same group of theocrats who famously fought to undermine evolution in science classes and delete from science textbooks the scientific consensus on the age of the universe because they conflict with the Bible.

As terrible as this religious imposition is for Texas students, all Americans have reason to fear. Due to the size of the Texas textbook market (and because other highly populated states do not use statewide textbook contracts in the say way), the backward dictates of its theocratic school board effect textbooks used by public school students all across the country.

Someone in Congress is finally standing up to this abuse of power and unconstitutional overreach by the religious extremists on the Texas State Board of Education. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (T-DX) recently introduced a resolution (H. Res. 1593) that supports fact-based curricula in public schools without meddling by those with an avowed religious agenda. Students in Texas and all across America need to know that Congress wants them to have an education based on facts and science, not myth and religious bias.

TAKE ACTION NOW: Watch the video message above from Secular Coalition for America Executive Director Sean Faircloth supporting Rep. Johnson’s resolution, and then tell your member of Congress to become a co-sponsor.

Sign it.