Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas has spent over $500,000 on its "Student Locator Project," a lanyard worn around the neck that has both a bar code and RFID tag built in. Students need the lanyard to use the library or cafeteria, vote in school elections, and in some cases for toilet breaks, and it allows the school to track their every movement throughout the day.
Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore student at the John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy in San Antonio, has been effectively expelled from school for refusing to wear the tags, citing religious, privacy, and freedom of expression reasons.
The school offered to give her a special lanyard with the RFID tag removed, but she refused to wear this, either, as it would be taken as her supporting the system. The school also stopped her from passing out leaflets to other students regarding the locator project. "I feel it's an invasion of my religious beliefs," she told InfoWars. "I feel it's the implementation of the Mark of the Beast*. It's also an invasion of my privacy and my other rights."
After a series of talks between the school, Hernandez, and her parents, her position at the science academy was "withdrawn" and she has been reassigned to another school. The family are now taking action against the school with the help of the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group.
The lawsuit will put a spanner in the works for the RFID tagging scheme, since the NISD already has plans to roll out the tracking scheme to over 100,000 students under its remit. The school district is hoping the system will increase school attendance, and thus win it a grant of nearly $2m from the state government.
Source: The Register
