Page 8 - THE Journal, March/April 2018

FEATURE | IT TRENDS
8
| MARCH/APRIL 2018
refrigerators and connected inventory, a more practical use is managing student meals. “That has always been the bane of schools to have to manage school lunch tickets and who gets credit for free-and- reduced lunch and what to do when
the kid has forgotten his milk money. I think that’s an opportunity.” Students can be supplied with a card that doesn’t necessarily identify them but does tie to a lunch-money or free-meal account.
Signaling Bus Usage
The cafeteria usage is similar to the application of a system in place at Colorado’s Adams 12 Five Star Schools. When students board or disembark
school buses, they wave an RFID card
at a small cell-phone-sized device that
logs their arrival or departure, including time and location. The Zonar Z Pass system has been in use at the district since 2010, said David Anderson, director of Transportation & Fleet. It covers about 11,000 kids who ride one of 163 buses.
Originally, noted Anderson, the tech was brought in to handle accounting. Families were charged based on their students’ ridership. But two years ago, the school board eliminated the bus fee, and now it has turned into a safety, security and risk management feature. “We know what students are on the bus. We have accountability. We know when they get off,” he said. “If a student is lost or there are any questions about it, we can say, ‘Your student got off at First and Main at 3:23 in the afternoon.’ It time-stamps it and through GPS it’s very accurate.” That isn’t simply a theoretical notion, he added. Parents call all the time to find out if their kids made it off the school bus.
That also poses a problem. Frequently, those parents want to know where their kids have headed after getting off the bus. The district’s dispatchers and schedulers have to explain that the card is basically dumb. As Anderson clarified, “There’s a metal coil, like a copper coil, sealed in plastic. We can’t track their student when they’re off the bus. It’s not ‘Big Brother’ at all. It’s a dead card that only works
When students come into the elementary library at St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, NC, they can ask the trained librarian, Sarah FitzHenry, what the title of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book is, or, better, they can ask Google Home.
[for one purpose], like door access. You scan your card. If you’re in the system, it authorizes you and opens the door.”
Yet the system, which is tied into a GPS operation for fleet management, is practical in other ways, too, Anderson said — routing and location tracking, scheduling, maintenance and creating a roster of students whose parents need to be notified when the bus is running late from a school event.
Sensing Door Access
While some businesses yearn for the day when personalization and localization will transform the shopping experience, a more pragmatic application for instant identification is opening the door.
Michael England, president of St. Mary’s High School in St. Louis, persuaded
his archdiocese to invest in a facial recognition system in early 2015 for the school. Small vestibules in the front and back of the building are outfitted with
a security camera. If the system, which comes from Blue Line Technology, recognizes the face of the person as being authorized to enter the school,
the door from the vestibule to the lobby opens automatically. If it’s somebody who isn’t allowed, “not only will the door not unlock for them,” said England, “but notifications can be sent to whoever we would like, informing us that this person is trying to get into the building.” That could include the local police, as well.