SUTTER, Calif. — This little Northern California farm town is blissfully unaccustomed to turmoil. But recent weeks dished up a hopper of dissent.
It started with a girl who went home from junior high saying she felt like an orange.
Lauren Tatro, 13, told her parents the plain facts. Every student at Brittan Elementary School had to wear a badge the size of an index card with their name, grade, photo -- and a tiny radio identification tag. The purpose was to test a new high-tech attendance system. To the eighth-grader, it seemed students had been turned into grocery items on the shelf, slabs of sirloin at the meat counter, fruit in the produce section.
So began a difficult stretch for this town of 2,885.
Outraged parents claimed the school was trampling their children's privacy and civil liberties, maybe even threatening their health. School board meetings overflowed. Folks talked of George Orwell, Big Brother and the Bible. The American Civil Liberties Union joined the fray. Parents picketed. TV news crews from as far away as Germany descended on the 600-student school.
At odds as they have been few times before, Sutter residents were dragged into a simmering national debate over the use of tracking technology on human beings.
Known as radio frequency identification, RFID for short, the technology has been around for decades. But only lately have big markets blossomed. Radio identification has been embraced by manufacturers and retailers to track inventory, deployed on bridges to automatically collect tolls and used on ranches to cull cattle. The microchips have been injected into pets.
But applying that technology in conjunction with people prompts an outcry from civil libertarians and privacy advocates. Proposals to use the high-tech ID tags in U.S. passports, Virginia driver's licenses and even San Francisco library books have drawn sharp fire. The ACLU characterizes such forays as the "seemingly inexorable drift toward a surveillance society."
Add schoolchildren to the list.
Critics in Sutter, an hour's drive north of Sacramento, say the aim at Brittan Elementary might have been an amped-up attendance system, but the badges, hung on lanyards that the students wore around their necks, represented something far more disturbing.
As some parents figured it, their children had been made high-tech guinea pigs.
Sutter is located a mile off a highway big-city folks don't normally travel. Farm fields flank a tidy grid of two-lane streets. The nearest traffic light is miles away in Yuba City.
Mostly it's a place of multigenerational families, some dating to the 1880s, with a smattering of newcomers. Folks meet and greet on the streets -- and mostly they get along.
Given the tranquil community sensibilities, school officials never anticipated controversy.
Earnie Graham, principal and superintendent of the one-school district, is a self-described "tech guy." He liked the badge idea because it would streamline the taking of attendance, giving teachers a few minutes more each day to teach and boost accuracy, no small matter given that California school funding is based on how many children attend class each day.
Aside from boldly going where no principal had gone before, Graham figured the new technology held an additional appeal: Homegrown talent was promoting it.
The founders of InCom Corp., the start-up firm marketing the idea, work at local schools or have children who attend them. They formed the firm about a year ago and paid the district $2,500 to test the system during summer school.
It went without a hitch. Each RFID has a miniature antenna connected to a tiny computer chip identifying the wearer.
When students walked into class, an RFID scanner mounted above the door recorded it, pumped out the roll on a teacher's wireless Palm Pilot and stored the attendance figures on a central computer.
Impressed, school trustees last October agreed to expand the project. They held a public hearing, but virtually no parents attended. In exchange for allowing it on campus, InCom promised unspecified royalties from future sales.
On Jan. 18, every student at the kindergarten-through-eighth grade school got a badge, though scanners were installed only in seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms.
Most of the pupils accepted it at first, but a few griped to their parents.
Mike and Dawn Cantrall, parents of two Brittan students, met with Graham to complain about the badges' having student photos and names, saying the information made them vulnerable to predators.
Only then did they learn about the radio tags inside.
The family asked that their children be excluded from the test.
"Our children are not inventory," the Cantralls said in a letter to the district. They said the monitoring program smacked of Big Brother. They also cited biblical warnings about the mark of the beast.
School administrators said the program was mandatory and threatened to discipline -- even expel -- students who didn't wear their badges.
