A couple of years ago a rural elementary school in California tried tracking students with RFID tags, as reported in Engadget's California school mandates RFID tags for students. Administrators felt the RFID would "simplify attendance-taking and reduce vandalism" and potentially "tracked in bathrooms and locker rooms". This sounds like the sort of thing that administrators can get excited about when left to their own devices (never mind that the school was being paid by the manufacturer for testing the product.) It seems like someone should have spoken up about what is problematic about proposing to "chip" kids like pedigree dogs.
If California school districts don't have IT managers that are ethically competent or sufficiently empowered to stop such a plan, the state legislature has saved them from this one particular issue. California's state legislature passed Identity Information Protection Act last year, but it was vetoed by the governor. This year's strategy is to try to pass it in pieces. This was the first to pass (for four years anyway), as The Register reported last week, in California Senate fights RFID tracking for schoolkids.
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