Few months ago, I was interviewed together with a colleague of mine for an article on The Journal. This is a highly acclaimed and popular education magazine which mostly features latest trends, big changes, and great ideas in the field of education. I happen to be involved with a project that has to do with monitoring and tracking students through their daily schedules using a system called Schedule Finder. This project is implemented in the secondary schools of my district. As such, I am posting the article below. I hope that you will learn some great information.

Hand It Over
by Linda Briggs, The Journal

Districts are turning to the latest in mobile technology to crack down on age-old campus crime problems such as graffiti and theft.

WHETHER VANDALISM, inappropriate dress, a drug deal, or a fight, an incident at a high school in Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso, TX, used to trigger the same result: Security officials marched the offenders to a central office to identify them, log a report, and check class schedules to see where those students belonged.

But that took time and left key corridors unpatrolled, an unintended invitation that other troublemakers often anticipated and took advantage of.

As a remedy, the district, which covers 45,000 K-12 students across 60 campuses, recently introduced in its seven high schools a system built on handheld Palm Pilot devices running a software product from Trusmart Technologies called ScheduleFinder, which lets officials remain stationed in school hallways even when a problem arises. Using their PDAs, security guards and administrators can check student schedules, access emergency information, identify students by photo, and with some devices, even take pictures of incidents as they happen.

The district tested the system for a year at a single high school and had “fairly dramatic results,” according to Ron Livermore, Ysleta’s coordinator of instructional technology initiatives. As a consequence, he convinced the other six high schools in the district to adopt the same setup. Over the next year, the system will be launched in the district’s middle schools as well.

Although the pilot school made no formal announcement when it introduced the handhelds and software, Livermore says, incidents involving graffiti at the high school quickly plummeted. In one use of the PDAs that proved effective, security officers employed the devices’ embedded cameras to photograph kids scrawling graffiti, catching them red-handed. The captured image of the students and their handiwork was then beamed immediately to the rest of the security staff.

Putting their PDAs to further use, the school issued “Top People to Watch” and “Top 10 Student Wanted” lists, including photos of students, converted to a digital format for handhelds. Because of the photo capabilities of the new system, wanted students can no longer hide out by claiming to be someone else or using a fake name, popular tactics used previously. “It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in the security safety model,” Livermore says.

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