Student Suspended for Refusing Tracking Chip Returns to School

Program has since been discontinued due to ineffectiveness

A Texas girl suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip is being re-admitted to her former high school where fall classes begin Monday, her lawyers said today.

The flap concerns Andrea Hernandez, who will be a junior at John Jay High in San Antonio. She was suspended in January and sued the Northside Independent School District on privacy and religious grounds.

She lost and began attending another school that did not require pupils to wear the ID badges. The girl's lawyers said today that  she is returning to the magnet school where the highly contested legal battle commenced. That's because the district has abandoned its year-long RFID-student monitoring program.

Radio-frequency identification devices are a daily part of the electronic age — found in passports, and library and payment cards. Eventually they are expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. Schools across the nation are slowly adopting them as well, despite the Northside district quietly deciding last month to discontinue RFID chips on grounds they were ineffective.