Three R's: Reading, Writing, RFID 

Gary Stillman, the director of a small K-8 charter school in Buffalo, New York, is an RFID believer.

While privacy advocates fret that the embedded microchips will be used to track people surreptitiously, Stillman said he believes that RFID tags will make his inner city school safer and more efficient.

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Stillman has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office. Eventually he'd like to expand the system to track students' punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses.

"That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22," Stillman said. "All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids.... Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us."

Radio-frequency identification tags -- which have been hailed as the next-generation bar code -- consist of a microchip outfitted with a tiny antenna that broadcasts an ID number to a reader unit. The reader searches a database for the number and finds the related file, which contains the tagged item's description, or in the case of Enterprise Charter, the student's information.

Unlike bar codes, which must be manually scanned, RFID-tagged items can be read when they are in proximity to a reader unit, essentially scanning themselves. The school uses passive RFID tags that are activated when radio waves from the reader reach the chip's antenna. (Active RFID tags incorporate a battery that constantly broadcasts the chip's ID number and are much more expensive.)

The technology has raised a ruckus in recent months, as companies such as Wal-Mart move from bar codes to RFID to track merchandise and libraries place the chips in books to streamline loans. Privacy advocates worry that the technology will be used to track people without their knowledge.

But for Stillman, whose public school is located in a gritty Buffalo neighborhood, RFID is about accounting for the whereabouts of his charges and streamlining functions.

"Before, everything was done manually -- each teacher would take attendance and send it down to the office," he said. "Now it's automatic, and it saves us a lot of time."

The charter school's 422 students wear small plastic cards around their necks that have their photograph, name and grade printed on them, and include an embedded RFID chip. As the children enter the school, they approach a kiosk where a reader activates the chip's signal and displays their photograph. The students touch their picture, and the time of their entry into the building is recorded in a database. A school staffer oversees the check-in process.

The school spent $25,000 on the ID system. The $3 ID tags students wear around their necks at all times incorporate the same Texas Instruments smart labels used in the wristbands worn by inmates at the Pima County jail in Texas. Similar wristbands are used to track wounded U.S. soldiers and POWs in Iraq and by the Magic Waters theme park in Illinois for cashless purchases.

But the Buffalo school is believed to be the first facility to use the technology to identify and track children.

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