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Phone Robots who nab kids that cut class
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| King_Mack |
interesting article...can you guys say big brother?
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Some teens call it Robocop, others dub it The Skipatron. But thanks to the hot new school phone message system that tells parents if kids have skipped class, they're so busted.
Caught between growing calls for accountability and cuts to office staff, schools are turning to technology to help keep students on their radar.
The hottest tools in the kit, from Scotland to Scarborough, are computer programs that phone the parents of students who missed class and deliver an incriminating recorded message.
"I have the most hated voice in North America," laughs Mark Miller, who can be heard on the phone from more than 2,000 schools across North America.
Miller is a Markham computer whiz and one of five partners in SynreVoice Technologies Inc.
The company, which developed the truancy software almost 10 years ago, has sold the system from Florida to Michigan, Vancouver to Charlottetown, including 30 schools across Toronto.
"This is a message from --- School: A student in your household in Grade ---, named ---, was absent Feb. 21 in periods --- and ---. Please call the school or send a note to provide an explanation," the recorded voice says.
"If you nip skipping early, it can have a positive effect on the dropout rate," says Miller, whose company also helps people pay parking tickets over the phone. "And with schools facing budget cuts, secretaries don't have the time to make the calls themselves."
The system works this way: Attendance is taken by the teacher on a standardized form, which is then scanned into the school's computer, which in turn activates the automatic phone calls.
Schools around the world are using other innovative ways to clamp down on truancy. Parents in Britain, Detroit and California can be fined if they let their kids play hooky, while in Philadelphia, a fancy student swipe card triggers a siren when a skip artist tries to sign back in.
Principals across Halton Region now e-mail parents at work to report Johnny has gone AWOL again, after the public school board bought the system, also by SynreVoice, for every high school. It's also used at the Catholic board in Dufferin-Peel, the public board in Sudbury and, as of this week, at public schools in Vancouver.
This microchip can even get kids out of bed.
Several Michigan schools fed up with late arrivals ordered the company's "Breakfast Club" software, which makes early-morning recorded wake-up calls to students.
But SynreVoice is not the only company dreaming up Big Brother-style surveillance for schools.
DAE Consulting of Claremont, in Durham Region, has developed a similar telephone program called Truancy Tracking that is in place at 50 schools across the Greater Toronto Area, said owner Dave Elrick.
And it is testing an even fancier spy gizmo at Cedarbrae Collegiate, where vice-principal Dave Leggett patrols the halls with a pocket Casio computer that can instantly call up the photo and timetable of every student he encounters lounging at the lockers during class, as well as their attendance record.
The system, not unlike the network police officers use to check your driving record, works like a charm, he says.
But it's not perfect.
Lester B. Pearson Collegiate in Scarborough accidentally programmed the calls one night to start at 4.30 a.m. — not p.m. — which principal Christopher Usih says "wasn't too popular with parents."
"It's not very accurate, either," grumbles Daniel, 17, a Grade 12 student at Northern Secondary School who says the machine mispronounces his name when it calls — adding an unexplained French accent — and kept calling about a course he had already dropped.
But the schools say it works.
At Northern Secondary, principal Bob Milne introduced the $5,000 SynreVoice system last month and has already seen a 30 per cent drop in missed classes — to 200 a day from 300 — in just three weeks.
"We want to catch kids early, before skipping becomes a chronic problem," he says. "Already 90 per cent of the Grade 9s we call have stopped skipping almost instantaneously."
Not surprisingly, some students are fighting back.
Mark Miller estimates at least one in five students erases the message before their parents get home, but schools keep a record of the attempted calls nonetheless.
"The system does cut down on skipping as long as the parents care, although some parents don't," says Tom Jutkovic, vice-principal of Monarch Park Collegiate. "Kids will get away with what they want to get away with, and it's the duty of the school to let the families know."
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| a-aplz |
| quote: | | "This is a message from --- School: A student in your household in Grade ---, named ---, was absent Feb. 21 in periods --- and ---. Please call the school or send a note to provide an explanation," the recorded voice says. |
hah i get that EXACT same message all the time. luckly i know the exact time they call my house (6:30) so i pick it up and pretend its my friend :D its so gay. then when i go the next day i get this little yellow slip and im supposed to go to the office and explain the absence but i dont ;/ |
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| DJ_Shockwav |
yea, they had this when i was in high school
i would just make sure to answer the phone when it called |
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| imprt2nr |
| my school has this and it never calls my house... and if it did i'd just pick up the damn phone, wow its that easy to beat the system..:disbelief |
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| King_Mack |
When i was in high school...i have my cell phone # to the office as my registered house phone number hahaha. Idiots.
that Photo ID thing on the palm pilot is pretty slick, cuz alotta ppl tell teacher that they have spare when they are caught wandering thru the halls. |
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| DaveSaenz |
When I was in High school, I used to get that....
Such BS it was....
I'm glad I'm outa there>...:rolleyes: |
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| cap |
When I was in school, it wasn't running till I was 18, and then they weren't allowed to send out those messages...
However 1 day I picked up the phone and heard that stupid message for my younger bro , lol |
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| Nadi |
| Nothing new. Whats it got to do with "Big Brother"? |
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| Essential1 |
| heh, my old school had the calling thing and the palm thing. I used to just put my cell# down at registration time & they'd be calling my cell all the time. But there was no escaping photo id check when i was in the hall.... |
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| BTG |
what i used to do, was sign out of school, since i'm 18...
but now, i dont have to worry about that, i just changed my phone number on the school computer to some other random number...
mwahhaha, h4x0r! |
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| decode |
| quote: | | Some teens call it Robocop, others dub it The Skipatron. |
LMFAO the skipatron! :stongue:
Unlucky for kids @ skool. They r gonna make it even more like jail. |
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| Arbiter |
Ugh this system has caused me more personal agony than I'd care to relate. Apparently somehow this local school got the idea that my phone number here at college was the phone number for some kid's parents, and apparently this kid skipped a lot of class, because I was getting called every day at like 6 p.m.
Well I tried to call up the school and explain to them that they are ing morons and that I am not the parent or guardian of Steven Baylor and that they have the wrong ing number. So they tell me they're going to change it, but of course, they don't actually do this, so after trying to explain it to them over the phone 3 times, I finally decided to go down to the school and force them to change it with me watching. But of course, the stupid desk clerk or whatever changed the number in the wrong database, anyway it wasn't the one the machine was using because I kept getting calls.
So I decided that if I was going to get them to actually change it, I would have to make my point a little more sternly. So I looked up the names and home phone #s of all the school administrators, and one night I sat down at about 2 in the morning and just started calling them, one after another. Whenever I got one on the phone, I explained that it wasn't very pleasant to receive annoying phone calls, and that if I didn't get removed from the machine's database before the next message reached me, I would have to consider the possiblity of seeking damages against the school and also against them personally for harassment. After that, I didn't receive any more calls. |
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