PROVIDENCE — With an increased emphasis on school safety across Rhode Island, identification cards, metal detectors and campus police officers have become familiar sights.

But do tracking devices that follow students’ every movement go too far?

When the Middletown School Department earlier this year piloted a program equipping elementary students’ backpacks with radio frequency locator tags, school officials promised improved safety for children in transit to and from school on buses.

“That’s Big Brother at its scariest,” said Steven Brown, president of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which strongly opposed the plan.

Brown wasn’t alone. The story made national news and House and Senate lawmakers, worried about privacy violations, passed legislation prohibiting the use of such tags to track students.

Governor Carcieri last week vetoed the bill reasoning in his veto message that “in certain circumstances, it may be helpful for schools to have the ability to quickly identify where each of their students is located.”

“Weather related natural disasters, terrorist or criminal events or even a need for use during field trips and outside school activities,” are examples of such scenarios, Carcieri wrote.

In the age of violent school attacks such as those at Columbine High School in Colorado and at Virginia Tech, school officials should have the option of using technology to keep students safe, he said.

But Rep. Charlene Lima, D-Cranston, the House sponsor of the bill, said it is one thing if parents wish to monitor their children, “however the government should not have a role in tracking people.”

“…With each passing day, we become more and more of a police state,” Lima said. “Since [the terrorist attacks] of 9/11, I understand times have changed, but we no longer hold dear our civil rights.”

A Middletown school official said the tracking devices were not meant to infringe upon students’ rights. The tags were placed on backpacks of children who rode buses and were used to track them in real time as they boarded and left the vehicles.

The idea was to help notify parents when a bus is running late, or has encountered trouble, as was the case during the December snowstorm that saw more than 50 Providence buses stranded for hours, said school facilities director Edward Collins, a program supporter. In more serious circumstances, the chips could alert school officials if a child was lost or abducted.

The Mobile Accountability Program, or MAP, was the brainchild of Collins’ brother, Chris Collins, a former engineering director at GTECH who left his job to start MAPIT Corp. Middletown was its first client, though Edward Collins said the district did not pay the company.

Collins said his brother approached the school district a year ago with the idea for the program. The School Committee liked it and a free, semester-long pilot program was launched last winter, incorporating about 80 students who ride buses at the Aquidneck Elementary School.

Parents were furnished with chips and given the option of whether to place them on their children’s bags, Collins said. Over 90 percent participated.

The results haven’t always been so smooth.

When officials in a Sutter, Calif., elementary school tried several years ago to track students with such tags during school hours, parents and the ACLU erupted. That story, too, made national headlines and the school quickly canceled the program.

Since then, several states, California included, have passed anti-tracking laws, including those that would ban human implanting of such tags, as some employers have tried to do.

But Brown, and others, say the privacy concerns are just one reason why tracking children is a bad idea. Because the technology isn’t foolproof, anyone able to gain access to the school’s network could follow a child’s every move, seriously compromising student safety.

“It might sound like a sense of security for the [district] to know where the students are, but you know how easy it is to take a backpack, or for a child to drop it or give it to someone else,” said Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III, D-Providence, the Senate sponsor of the bill. “You might think you know where the student is, but you don’t.”

“If you want to make sure a kid is on the bus, why not just count them?” said Guilherme Roschke, a fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy protection research center in Washington, D.C.

Roschke said similar proposals in other states typically haven’t been accompanied by data or research that shows why the tracking technology is necessary.

In Middletown, despite what Collins calls a successful pilot, the district has no plans to implement the program this fall. “Due to everyone’s budget constraints, we’re not in the position to go out and buy the software,” he said. He said he could not give an estimate for the system’s price.

Carcieri’s veto effectively allows other communities to launch similar programs.

Lima calls that possibility frightening. “Our Constitution is clear. The government should not be doing this,” she said. “They should not be in the role of taking away people’s civil rights or their privacy. That includes children.”

With Journal archive reports from Meaghan Wims.

cneedham@projo.com