After carefully reading the article again, I come away with a really sneaking suspicion that this whole debacle may have come out of a clever little bit of backroom lobbying and salesmanship by a Texas-based RFID system design/install company owner.
Texas law counts a student present for purposes of distributing state aid to education funds based on the number of pupils in the classroom at the start of the day. Northside said it was losing $1.7 million a year due to students loitering in the stairwells or chatting in the hallways.
Why is the Texas school funding statute requiring such a very specific means of accounting - within a classroom and at only a certain time of day - for the student head count/roll call data to be gathered and considered valid to qualify for magnet school funding per capita? Is there really any compelling reason to deny funding if it were simply based on a regular "home room" roll call account data, like it is in every fucking magnet school ever?
Also, if the bullshit answer is, "The RFID system will prevent fraud". What fraud? Do they really think that the money spent to fund such a fine high school is gonna be trolled by huckster teachers and admins? And if they did think that, for real, then what would prevent said hucksters from goofing the system with identity theft-based requests for extra RFIDs? I mean, what the fuck is the purpose of this? Other than to make money for whichever RFID installation company won the contract?
When I was in high school in the mid seventies, it was also at the equivalent today of a magnet school, and we had roll call at home room at about 10:15am every school day. This was all done by hand, and the homeroom data was totaled by the main office within an hour. If a student skipped home room to go fuck off, they got called up to the office later, because every single class room period had attendance noted by the teacher and turned in, too. If you showed up for even just one class, you got counted as attending, that class data would be looked through to catch "skips", and you would be written up for skipping all the other classes, and got shit loads of grief for it.
So why is it suddenly necessary to go all high tech for accounting attendance when it has been done accurately since my great grandmother's time?