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Students are Continually Treated Like Prisoners

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One of my biggest goals since entering teaching was that my students appreciate my classes enough to actually want to attend them.

My dream is to have my students wake up on a school morning and say:

“Hey, I’ve got school today, and that’s OK”.

Fundamentally, it is the job of the educator to teach well enough to engage their students. We have to do better than forcing our children to attend school, we have got to find a way to make them feel comfortable with going out of their own volition.

Fitting GPS tracking devices to their IDs is sending the message that our system has given up trying. It has decided that it hasn’t got the time, energy or creativity to make school palatable, so it has no choice but to make prisoners out of the school population.

Students will therefore be getting the following message:

1. School is tedious;

2. The school administration think of us like prisoners;

3. The school administration don’t trust us;

4. We ate just a number. Just a blip on a computer screen. We are not unique, special or important. Just a sheep being watched over by a duty bound shepard.

To 15-year-old Andrea Hernandez, the tracking microchip embedded in her student ID card is a “mark of the beast,” sacrilege to her Christian faith – not to mention how it pinpoints her location, even in the school bathroom.

But to her budget-reeling San Antonio school district, those chips carry a potential $1.7 million in classroom funds.

Starting this fall, the fourth-largest school district in Texas is experimenting with “locator” chips in student ID badges on two of its campuses, allowing administrators to track the whereabouts of 4,200 students with GPS-like precision. Hernandez’s refusal to participate isn’t a twist on teenage rebellion, but has launched a debate over privacy and religion that has forged a rare like-mindedness between typically opposing groups.

Click on the link to read What’s Next? A No Breathing Rule?



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