• State senator, parents, families uniting to end microchipping of all Texas students.
By Mark Anderson —
A Texas state senator is standing up for personal freedom and privacy rights by introducing legislation that would ban schools from forcing radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on students for the purpose of tracking their whereabouts during school hours.
During Texas coverage in 2012 and 2013, this writer saw firsthand the growing bureaucratic efforts by the sprawling Northside Independent School District (NISD) in west San Antonio, Texas to make its entire student population, consisting of some 100,000 students, wear necklace-style name tags embedded with RFID chips.
These chips emit a signal enabling the authorities to track students—treating human beings like inventory and infringing on their rights and privacy.
One of the leading opponents of this form of human tracking, parent Steve Hernandez, is staying in the fight, ever since his daughter, Andrea, sparked and led a student resistance to NISD’s costly RFID plans. Her activism, starting in 2012, turned into a growing movement to challenge this kind of monitoring across the nation and even overseas.
By November 2013, the entire Hernandez family attended the AMERICAN FREE PRESS Free Speech Conference in Austin, Texas to recap the fact that they had made NISD blink and suspend the RFID program. AFP celebrated their victory with them at that gathering.
But Hernandez and Andrea won that phase of the fight because they won’t back down and they know what may lurk behind the scenes. Nowadays, Hernandez is mindful that NISD someday may attempt to re-install RFID after his daughter, now a senior, graduates in June or his activist son, Vincent, graduates two years later.
“They’re being very quiet right now. . . too quiet,” Hernandez told AFP about NISD.
As of this writing, Steve informed this writer that the tremors from his daughter’s efforts are still being felt in the Texas Legislature. Republican State Senator Lois W. Kolkhorst has introduced anti-RFID legislation, Senate Bill 486, which says, in part:
A school district may not require a student to use an identification device that uses active radio frequency identification technology or similar technology to identify the student, transmit information regarding the student or track the location of the student.
New Texas Governor Gregory Wayne “Greg” Abbott has a reasonably respectable track record for liberty, especially his solid national opposition when he was state attorney general against the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty two years ago.
So if the Kolkhorst bill is not watered down and becomes law, the chances of NISD or any other Texas school district implementing the use of RFIDs will diminish. And with some tenacity, a major victory could be won in the Lone Star State—which would ripple across the nation.
Hernandez said of Kolkhorst’s measure: “The bill has been referred to the Senate Education Committee and her office reached out to me about putting together a witness list for the hearing.”
Hernandez also noted that with more state Senate “conservatives” in office, the climate has improved for passing the bill.
At first blush, Kolkhorst appears to be a good ally for Hernandez. She has led several statewide initiatives. Protecting property rights, she made national news for organizing resistance to the Trans-Texas Corridor network of foreign-owned toll roads which, if ever completed, would result in massively wide express routes for free-trade truck and rail deliveries across the American heartland into Canada, threatening local economies along the way, via the “NAFTA/CAFTA express.”
Prior coverage:
AFP Roving Editor Mark Anderson is a veteran reporter who covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects.
Americans need to speak out against all this evil that has come from Texas.
Steve Hernandez scared the heck out of NISD Leadership. If NISD’s RFID program was only about capturing state funding for under-reported attendance, then NISD leadership deserves to be reprimanded for not doing the math.
By NISD’s own figures the initial program would have cost $30 million for full district implementation. The state only pays $30 per student per day.
The NISD RFID program would have had to catch 1 million UNDER-REPORTED attendances in a population of 100,000 students just to break even. Not counting the $1.5 million annual card replacement cost for 115,000 students and staff.
The NISD Superintendent and his financial advisers need to take a remedial math course after this horrible debacle. NISD really gave themselves a bloody nose on this one.