In the past twenty years, school shootings and state legislation have developed a multi-million-dollar industry for school security systems. These systems include cameras, metal detectors, and visitors’ driver license verification. In this advancement of school safety and efficiency, some schools have implemented Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) in student IDs and bus passes to track the location of students both on campus and off campus. RFID uses radio transponders, receivers, and transmitters to identity and track the tags attached to products or livestock, with their associated data. Attaching RFID to humans should lead parents to ask questions about privacy. What data is collected and how is it stored? Who can access the data? How can a parent opt-out? Do these million-dollar security systems improve safety? Many privacy experts, from both liberal and conservative watchdog groups, share concerns about these safety programs evolving into surveillance programs using RFID.
Development of School Security Systems & Need for Audit
There are several school security management systems: CrisisGo, Navigate360, Rave, Ident-a-kid, Centegix, and Raptor Technologies. This article will focus on the most common security system in Colorado schools, but will not answer every security question for each school because schools use different components of these safety systems. This information can serve as a guide for parents to ask questions locally or to request an audit of their school security system.
Raptor Technologies was founded in 2002 in Texas, where the first pilot program for RFID badges was conducted in Houston and San Antonio school districts. Twenty years later in 2022, Raptor reported, “More than 6,700 Texas Schools, and 35,000 schools across the US, utilize Raptor to screen visitors, track volunteers, report on safety drills, respond to emergencies, and reunite families.” While states mandated school security requirements, Raptor Technologies developed the Raptor School Safety Suite to meet and exceed every demand of the mandated requirements. For example, Raptor developed the volunteer management system prior to it being mandated in Colorado. Often the lobbyists for health and safety legislation, which pass these mandates, are portrayed as grassroots parent groups, however, group leaders are promoting the products, services, and agendas of the industry.
In Colorado, the Cherry Creek School District website states, “New Colorado legislation has prompted a greater need to screen and document volunteers in our schools. Therefore, beginning January 2022, we must ensure that every volunteer completes a brief application to support activities in CCSD schools. This information will be automatically linked to the Raptor System.”
The Cherry Creek School District launched an RFID bus pass system in 2022. It tracks where every student gets on and off the bus, and where the bus is located. Every student in the district was issued an RFID card, not just the bus riders. The system sends a notification to parents’ phones. The district claims the technology is for safety, and some parents report that it gives them peace of mind. But what are the safeguards to prevent this geolocation data of children from criminals and sex offenders? This is an important question to ask in an audit.
In 2023, Raptor Technologies bought SchoolPass, “a K-12 platform helping schools manage attendance, campus movement, and campus wellness, in the cloud.” Anyone who disagreed with the mass COVID19 testing and exclusion of non-symptomatic students should have many questions about SchoolPass tracking “campus wellness.” (I know a student who was sent home from school three different weeks for false positives on SARS-CoV-2 test results0. Furthermore, storing data “in the cloud” is not the closed data system stored only at the school as it is portrayed to parents.
Raptor Technologies reported a case study in Greeley-Evans in 2021 for visitor, and volunteer, and safety drill management systems. The results included identifying nine sex offenders in the 2018-2019 school year. However, the system does not prevent sex offenders from entering the school because there can be a lag in verifying a visitor’s ID against a database:
“Greeley-Evans turned to Raptor Technologies to address visitor, volunteer, and drill management. The Raptor Visitor Management system scans visitors’ state-issued IDs against national sex offender databases and can be configured to vet visitors against locally customized databases for things like custody and guardianship status. Approved visitors receive a printed sticker badge identifying them to school personnel as cleared to be in the building. If a visitor is not cleared, silent notifications are instantly sent to appropriate administrators and school safety officials, who intercede before the person enters deeper into the building and can threaten students or staff. Integrated with the Visitor Management system is the Raptor Volunteer Management system, which enables prospective volunteers to apply easily via a customizable online tool, similarly vets them for sex offender status and compiles background screening data for fast district review and approval, saving both time and expense.”
Raptor Technologies claims it does not share information with outside agencies like INS or ICE, but it does share information with law enforcement. Some of the services include providing law enforcement and public safety agencies complete digital maps of the school interior and exterior. Again, what are the safeguards to prevent these school maps from being accessed by potential shooters? Are these maps which are accessed on cellular phone applications stored in the cloud or encrypted? According to a Raptor Technologies press release in July 2023, Florida legislation mandated that campus maps must be incorporated into school security software programs. Raptor Technologies stands to gain $14 million in appropriations for this mandated security program in Florida, and that appropriation diverts $14 million away from improving academic achievement.
In 2023 Aspen School District reported a test of the Raptor Alert system to lockdown schools and reported the application to be faster than the previously used radio system. But applications are dependent on WIFI, which could be unreliable or compromised.
The most important question is do these million-dollar systems prevent the worst-case scenario of a mass shooter? In the Uvalde school shooting, the investigation by the Texas state legislature concluded that the Raptor system did not prevent a mass shooting:
“Poor Wi-Fi service and a staff desensitized to alerts by frequent notifications diminished the effectiveness of Robb Elementary School’s digital emergency system during the May 24 massacre there, hampering teachers’ ability to swiftly to secure their classrooms and students, according to an investigative report published Sunday.
The emergency alert system, called Raptor, was implemented by Uvalde’s school district in February 2022 to disseminate information about on-campus or nearby police activity. But on May 24, the alert system failed to sufficiently warn staff as a gunman approached the school and killed 21 people, the report found, even after the school’s principal triggered it.”
Funding Security Systems at the Expense of Privacy & Health
In Tracking School Children with RFID Tags? It’s All About the Benjamins, (September 2012), Wired.com summarizes that in the student pilot programs in Texas “it appears that the educational move to Big Brother-style monitoring is motivated mainly by money, despite privacy and health concerns.” The schools argue that they can collect more state funding by increasing attendance numbers for students who are in the building but not in their classroom seats. The Texas program requires students to wear an RFID on a lanyard on campus and could pinpoint the exact location of students on campus.
The RFID badge system is not an encrypted system. “The lack of encryption makes it not technically difficult to clone a card to impersonate a fellow student or to create a substitute card to play hooky, and makes the cards readable by anyone who wanted to install their own RFID reader…” These techniques to subvert RFID badges are known as cloning, brute force, and Man-in-the-Middle.
Privacy experts, from both liberal and conservative organizations, who understand the incremental tactics of a surveillance state have concerns. “We don’t think kids in schools should be treated like cattle,” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a telephone interview. “We generally don’t like it. My take on RFID is it’s fine for products, but not so much for people. That’s one of the places where the lines need to be drawn.”
Watchdogs also report potential health risks with wearing RFID devices daily:
“RFID systems emit electromagnetic radiation, and there are lingering questions about whether human health might be affected in environments where the reading devices are pervasive,” the paper said. “This concern and the dehumanizing effects of ubiquitous surveillance may place additional stress on students, parents, and teachers.”
Texas Student Lawsuit & Legislation to Ban RFID Tracking Students
Within a year of the 2012 Texas pilot program with RFID tracking students, there was a lawsuit and proposed state legislation to ban RFID student tracking.
In 2013, Republican Texas lawmakers sponsored three failed bills attempting to protect privacy concerns: prohibit the use of RFID to track students, allow parents to opt out of an RFID tracking program, and keep school districts from punishing students who choose not to participate in RFID tracking.
High-school student Andrea Hernandez, who refused to wear the RFID badge because it violated her civil liberties and religious beliefs, sued a San Antonio Northside School District in federal court. U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia ruled that the school had the right to expel the sophomore because she refused to wear the RFID badge, which was required of all students on school property. Hernandez was expelled from school. The school district spokesman said the software only works within the school building, and cannot track the movements of students, and does not allow students to be monitored by third parties. However according to GovTech, anyone with a compatible RFID reader could track the students. Thus, the American Civil Liberties Union sided with Hernandez against GPS tracking of students, and despite the federal court ruling in the district’s favor Northside School District discontinued the program due to public backlash. Hernandez was allowed to re-enroll after a year-long legal battle with the school, but she transferred to another school.
Hernandez’s attorneys at the Rutherford Institute detailed the coercive functions of the RFID program where “students who refused to take part in the ID program were not able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor would they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. According to Hernandez, teachers were even requiring students to wear the IDs to use the bathroom.” The data collected could include if a student visited a school psychologist or certain clubs.
As reported by Slate, “Still, the Rutherford Institute, the civil liberties group that sued the district, is claiming a belated victory. Institute President John Whitehead said in a statement: ‘As Andrea Hernandez and her family showed, the best way to ensure that your government officials hear you is by never giving up, never backing down, and never remaining silent—even when things seem hopeless.’”
Texas school districts conveyed gains of hundreds of thousands of dollars for improved documentation of attendance, and hoped to gain $2 million in state funding after investing $261,000 in one year. Texas Public Radio reported “Attendance only increased by 0.5 percent, which generated $136,000 in state reimbursement.” Cherry Creek School District in Colorado reports that the RFID bus system cost $700,000 to set up and $400,000 annually to maintain, so the cost-benefit value in dollars is not evident. Or The only way to measure the revenue benefit is to compare the funding gained by increased attendance reporting to the cost of the system.
Protecting Constitutional Privacy & School Safety
In “Tracking Devices on Student ID Badges: An Unconstitutional Violation of Privacy or a Legitimate Safety Precaution?” reported that Supreme Court has ruled that long-term RFID tracking is illegal:
“However, the most analogous facts, with respect to the RFID tracking device, is last year’s Supreme Court decision, United States v. Jones. The 2012 decision in Jones found warrants to be required in order to place GPS tracking devices on cars, as the placing of the GPS monitor was considered a trespass. The Supreme Court found the 28-day GPS monitoring of Jones’ car violated his reasonable expectation of privacy due to the prolonged period of constant monitoring. Jones only correlates to the school RFID tracking devices with respect to the length and duration of GPS monitoring. As the Supreme Court found 28 days of tracking excessive, would RFID tracking every day for an academic year violate even a student’s lesser expectation of privacy?”
The Campbell Law Observer also proposed an alternative solution to RFID badges for students:
“With some students tolerating invasions of privacy by walking through metal detectors, being searched, and recorded on cameras in schools, a limit needs to be established – how far is too far? Instead of tracking the location of students, schools can use these badges as electronic keys that must be scanned at a keypad in order to unlock building doors. These electronic keys can keep buildings secure from unauthorized persons, while also providing schools with the ability to maintain attendance records. Students can physically scan their ID at a designated card reader rather than using IDs to display students as moving blinking lights on a computer monitor, tracking their every move. These badges accomplish the same goals and become less burdensome on privacy rights by eliminating the constant monitoring.”
Conclusion
With school board elections upcoming, school safety will be an area of concern for candidates and parents. School shootings have given parents reason to fear. However, the draconian pandemic response to COVID19 highlights why leaders must also protect privacy and Constitutional rights when confronted with a crisis. There are students in Special Education with propensity to wander and get lost, and the parents of those at-risk students should have options for higher levels of tracking. At a minimum, all parents should have the right to consent to or opt-out of these programs and audit the data collected on their children. If we do not put limits on RFID tracking of students in schools now, then we can expect those same security programs to become commonplace in the public workplaces of the future.
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