In the "old days," the worst disciplinary problem administrators faced was catching students smoking in the restroom. In these uncertain, post-Columbine times, citizens and educators alike share valid concerns for security in schools, and the safety of the students attending them.
McKinley administrators needed a faster, more efficient method of accessing and transferring vital student information in disciplinary and emergency situations on school grounds.
Wireless Timesaver
This fall, McKinley Technology High School, of the District of Columbia Public Schools, deployed Defywire's Mobile Guardian system, which lets administrators instantly access and update student information on Wi-Fi-enabled PDAs.
"What I'm trying to do is to use technology to improve student services in general," said McKinley Tech Principal Daniel Gohl. "I need to increase use of our most precious resource, which is time."
With Mobile Guardian, student information, such as students' attendance records, class schedules, medical information and parent information, can be accessed anytime. And the means to instantly address problems is literally in the palms of teachers' and administrators' hands -- they can immediately handle problems that arise on school grounds and take the appropriate course of action, such as contacting parents, addressing a health problem or finding out where a student should be at any given time, without ever returning to the office.
Security Measures
Privacy is a concern with any computer-based system, and there's a lot of personal information stored on the PDAs. Gohl explains that there are two levels of security for Mobile Guardian.
One is the network itself.
"We have an 802.11 network that this is riding," he said. "That is an intranet service, so there are several layers of external security. We have not had a problem with losing the information."
The second is at the application layer.
"Encrypting the data as it's transmitted means, should the network be penetrated, that actual packets are encrypted," he explained. "So even if the data screen should be compromised, it's unintelligible."
Gohl said there have been no problems with hackers, but can't promise there won't be any in the future.
Practical Benefits
School officials said the system saves them time and resources.
If school personnel need to make notations on a particular situation, that information can be immediately entered into the mobile device rather than scribbling it in a notebook, deciphering the scribbles and retyping the information later into an office PC.
"These are all not only timesavers, but actual savers of material resources like paper, toner and having the observations archived as they are recorded," Gohl said. "If I can use mobile devices and have data captured and stored quickly, I want to do that."
Thus far, four school administrators have been equipped with the mobile devices, but Gohl hopes to extend the system's use on the campus.
"I hope to eventually have them in the hands of teachers as well," he said. "If an incident happens or a teacher needs to look up a student's schedule, let that happen where the students interact with the adults, not have to move them to an office. The mobile devices deliver that."
For instance, should an incident occur, while focusing on the incident itself, a teacher or administrator can simultaneously access information regarding the students involved.
"Anything that we need to access in terms of the stored record, or to generate a new record, we can do at the point of interaction," Gohl said.
In time, Gohl intends to explore other uses of the mobile devices.
"I am looking to actually get it in the hands of administrators with a slightly different interface that will allow them to go in and do observations of teachers so that the observation is recorded in real time and can automatically be e-mailed to the teacher at the conclusion."
That means at the end of the class period in which an administrator has observed a teacher for evaluation or comment, the teacher's mailbox won't be stuffed with hand-written notes, photocopies and other papers -- something teachers appreciate.
Where's Waldo ... and George?
"One of the main tenets of No Child Left Behind is the accountability of schools for students," Gohl said.
The law's primary component is making sure children are not left behind academically, but making sure children are not literally left behind -- at home, on field trips or skipping classes -- is also a concern for schools. Mobile Guardian helps the school be more accountable for students' whereabouts, keeping better track of excused and unexcused absences.
"If we can increase the quality of our data when it comes to attendance, we are improving our compliance," Gohl said.
This might all sound a bit too much like Big Brother meets the truant officer. This sort of scrutiny can make citizens uneasy in an Orwellian age, when we seem to be sacrificing our right to privacy in the interest of security. In fact, some parents did voice concerns about the increased monitoring of their children.
"We are not in fact upping the monitoring," Gohl said. "We are changing the way in which our monitoring occurs."
Entering information in the mobile device is no different than having an administrator make a notation in a notebook, said Gohl.
Fleet Feat
A truly mobile application of Mobile Guardian's reporting system is being explored in the transportation department of the public schools in neighboring Fairfax County, Va.
"We are piloting a small number of AVL [automatic vehicle locator] units on our buses," said Linda Farbry, director of Transportation Services. "The infrastructure has just been completed, and we have staff working on reports to see if we can capture the information we want in a manageable way."
She said there's a long way to go before business processes are organized and the training is finalized, but once the system is functional, it will be possible to monitor the speed of buses on heavily traveled roads, and improve run time estimates.
Greater accuracy in determining arrival times of buses at schools and stop locations, as well as logging actual bus speeds, will help school officials better respond to complaints.
Also of interest to Fairfax schools is pinpointing bus locations in case of an emergency.
"This will enable us to deploy nearby buses to assist with breakdowns and identify locations of accidents for accurate response, or locate vehicles when threats have been made or buses are subjected to hostile action," Farbry said. "Real-time, accurate and objective information is an unusual resource in our operation."
