Tech Tags Monitor Students' Comings and Goings
TOKYO — Every time a fourth-grader passes through Rikkyo Elementary School's front gate, a small gray plastic tag tucked inside his backpack beams a message to a computer in a nearby office.
The students are oblivious, but the computer logs the time they enter and leave, and a security guard watching the screen takes note. Moments later, their parents receive confirmation by e-mail.
In Japan, high-tech tagging has made the jump from grocery stores to the schoolyard.
Rikkyo officials hope that the radio frequency identification technology will serve as an early warning system for children who go missing.
"This won't prevent crimes against children," said Tsukasa Tanaka, principal at the private boys school in Tokyo. "But without the tags, we might not know that a student hadn't made it to school until we take roll. That's too late."
A handful of high-profile child murders have shocked low-crime Japan, prompting Rikkyo to look into several types of electronic monitoring.
The school, one of two in the country testing the tags, chose them because other technologies such as satellite-based tracking would have betrayed too much information about students' whereabouts. With the tags -- about the size of small key chains -- officials and parents will know if a student is late for school in the morning. Parents will also know if a child takes longer than usual to get home.
Like many schoolchildren in Tokyo, Rikkyo's students can spend as many as two hours getting to school by themselves on busy trains and subways. The school bans mobile phones, but parents wanted more assurances after the 2001 school slayings and recent kidnapping threats against one of Rikkyo's students, Tanaka said.
"I think the tags are a good idea because my two sons almost never leave school together," said Kimiko Shino, 38, who has one son in second grade and one in third. Shino said she has no worries that the tags, which store only a child's name and class, could violate her family's privacy.
"Now I'll know what time to expect them home," she said of her sons, whose commute to Rikkyo takes 30 minutes.
Developed by Japanese semiconductor and computer maker Fujitsu Ltd., the tags use a technology that is beginning to gain acceptance globally.
Retailers and delivery companies use radio frequency identification to keep tabs on merchandise. Motorists with prepaid cards zip through toll gates without stopping. Delta Airlines plans to adopt a radio frequency identification baggage-handling system at every U.S. airport it serves.
