Parents Sue School for Use of Increasingly Popular ID Scan Technology

Just Curious
Dec 3, 2008 12:48 PM CST

I find it interesting that this family, according to what is in the article, does not seem to care who enters a school attended by their children.  If it means protecting our children, I have no problem with signing in or being screened.  The days are gone when we can trust anyone to just walk into a school and not cause harm.  Parents do whatever they can to protect their children every day.  Why should we not want our school officials, to whom we have entrusted our children during the day, to be able to do the came?

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df
Dec 3, 2008 9:35 PM CST

My initial reaction was likewise, who cares, but then…

Apparently some schools fail to even screen their employees (teachers or otherwise) as to sexual offences, but require a higher standard for parents visiting their child’s school?! How about dealing with teachers who molest children first…

Are visiting parents also subjected to metal detectors or other weapons checks? Do the schools do a search to see if there are any restraining orders relating to e.g. custodial situations to prevent parental kidnapping? If not, isn’t that more of a risk?

If someone is in the database, but their child goes to the school, are they forbidden from e.g.attending parent-teacher conferences?

What happens when the next step is fingerprinting and checks in a fingerprint database, then DNA samples, then…

What about those who don’t have a driver’s license or photo ID? There are some people who don’t drive or have a passport, or any other photo ID, if they’re a parent are they thus forbidden from visiting their child’s school?

For jurisdictions that school children regardless of their immigration status (for this point I am not arguing the merits of that one way or the other), do their parents get exempted from this policy while legal residents are stuck with it?

I would note also that for some states, who gets labelled a sexual offender sometimes includes questionable verdicts or is extremely broad (e.g. I think there was that case of teenagers, for whom it was legal under their state’s law to have sex, one of them took a cell-phone picture = child pornography conviction and registered as sex offender, in a few years if one of them is a parent are they forbidden from visiting their child’s school?).

All of which is a long way of saying while I don’t see this as a big problem, I can at least understand that there may be reasonable (non-insane) problems with or objections to this policy.

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