The slippery slope slickens…
Orwell's '1984' was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
(NY Post) — A group of Long Island students will soon be wearing controversial electronic monitors that allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock.
The athletics chair for the Bay Shore schools ordered 10 Polar Active monitors, at $90 a pop, for use starting this spring. The wristwatch like devices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students’ sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity.
The ‘around the clock’ monitoring is where it gets real sticky (not that I am pro school hours monitoring, quite the contrary) in my opinion. If it were a child of mine, I’d be livid. The monitor would be ripped off of my child’s wrist so fast, the entire school district board’s heads would spin.
But Ted Nagengast, the Bay Shore athletics chair, said, “It’s a great reinforcement in fighting the obesity epidemic. It tells kids, in real time, ‘Am I active? Am I not active?’ We want to give kids the opportunity to become active.”
Preposterous! There is no need for electronic monitoring to alert if one is active or not. Either one is active, or one is sedentary. The entire justification is utterly inane. Which leads me to believe, that there is much more to the monitoring than meets the eye.
In the South Orange-Maplewood School District, where earlier versions of the devices have been used for two years, upper-grade students’ marks in phys ed are based in part on heart-rate monitors and activity sensors.
No offense to the blind but, are all phys-ed teachers blind? Can they not see if the students are physically active????? Or since they are monitored 24/7, does their physical activity or lack thereof at home come into play? If so, WTH?
Teachers use hand-held computers to collect data from each student’s wrist monitor during class, then upload the information to the school computer system for storage and long-term tracking.
But privacy advocates and parents worry that schools are using electronic monitors in phys ed without families’ knowledge or consent.
Their concerns are valid. According to this St. Louis mother her child was monitored without her knowledge or consent.
“I didn’t even know it was going on, and I’m active in the school,” said Beth Huebner, of St. Louis.
Her son, a fourth-grader, wore a Polar Active monitor in class without her OK last fall at Ross Elementary School.
……
“It’s all about secondary use,” said Virginia Rezmierski, an expert on information technology and privacy at the University of Michigan.“Does the data pass along with the child from school to school? When will insurance companies want to get access to it? Will a school want to medicate a child that the monitor identifies as hyperactive? It’s potentially very dangerous ground.”
Exactly. I wonder if FLOTUS Fat Czar’s “Let’s Move” campaign has anything to do with this invasion of privacy. There could be some crony ties to the company “Polar Electro, of Lake Success, LI, the US division of a Finland firm” supplying the monitors as well.
This flagrant educational overreach calls for a taste of Pink Floyd.
Teachers leave them kids alone!
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January 20, 2012 at 6:26 pm
This information is absolutely false. The source is the NY post which is not known to be a hotbed of facts. Here are the facts: The devices are only used with parental consent and only with volunteer students. No one is forced to wear them. No one has to wear them at night. They are educational tools for student who are interested to personally know how active they are. Just like a text book, a student signs one out and then brings it back to the school after use with all their personal information cleared. No information is downloaded, stored or recorded at all by anyone at the school. Before you publish things, check your facts.
Who are you protecting?
Other news source links:
UPI: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2012/01/15/Schools-to-monitor-obesity-in-students/UPI-81011326654182
WPIX (New York): http://www.wpix.com/news/local/wpix-school-district-obesity-fight-011712,0,7235641.story
Lookie another one regarding St Louis area schools!
Metro St. Louis Suburban Journals: http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/metro/education/parkway-s-use-of-fitness-monitors-raises-privacy-questions/article_af46b549-0f1e-5a41-8a26-7f77c91ced20.html
Hey Terry “check your factsâ€.
These electronic devices will represent the mirror for today’s parents who all too often neglect the relationship with their own children and thus contribute to the spread of childhood obesity. That’s why I think there’s no such measure that would sufficiently protect children as far as their health is concerned unless their parents spend as much time with them as they could. In order to avoid similar problems later in life they should realize that the natural development of every child requires the parent’s presence and care especially in the first years of life. That’s why I visited as many baby-centers in Toronto as possible when my children were born. I discovered a number of funny ways to build a strong relationship and I always try to spend as much of my free time as possible with them to avoid similar problems in their adolescence.