A Brazilian city has come up with a ingenious idea: embedding grade-school student uniforms with locator chips to let parents know if their kids skip school. Twenty-five of Vitoria da Conquista's 213 public schools started using the uniforms with chips this week. The city expects to have all of its students wearing these "intelligent uniforms" by 2013. If this actually works to prevent kids from cutting classes, the U.S. should look into it as an option to curb this problem here too.
Here's how it works: the chips are placed in the uniform's T-shirt underneath the school's coat-of-arms or on one of the sleeves. The radio frequency chips, similar to the ones your pet probably has, let a computer know when kids enter school and send a text message to parents' cell phones to alert them too.
Read more in ¿Qué más?: Should teen sexting be a crime?
But if children don't show up 20 minutes after school starts, parents are texted with the following message: "Your child has still not arrived at school," as reported by FoxNewsLatino. The city's education secretary, Coriolano Maraes, told the news site that they noticed a lot of parents just dropped their kids off at school, but didn't wait for them to go in because they had to rush to work. Later, they were always surprised to find out how many times their kids had cut classes.
The city spent a ton of money–close to $700,000–to design, test and manufacture the microchipped T-shirts, which I'm sure would be one of the deterrents of doing something like this in the U.S., considering the gigantic budget cuts our public school system is constantly facing. Either way, with the big problem we have regarding kids' skipping school and the future effects this has on our children's education, I think it would be worth looking into.
Want to find other moms como tú? "Like" MamásLatinas on Facebook!
The other issue we'd have to overcome after cost is that most public schools here do not use uniforms, which I already think is absolutely wrong. And then, of course, there's the issues of civil rights, individuality and freedom, among many others I'm sure lots of opponents would bring up. But maybe those people need to come up with a better idea to prevent this epidemic, which some times might start with just skipping school for laughs, but many times ends up in kids leaving school for good.
Do you think it'd be a good idea for our schools to embed our children's uniforms with locator chips?
Image via Alba Sud Fotografia/flickr
