Subject: [NEXTEL-1] More On Boston Public Schools, Truancy & Nextel

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 17:56:54 -0500

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TALK OF THE BROADBAND ECONOMY

December 9, 2002 10:47am

Class action

Under a mandate put forth by the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice
committee 10 years ago, Boston Public Schools instituted a program
authorizing attendance, probation and school police officers to run
daily truancy sweeps throughout the city to catch kids ditching
school. In that time, the program has reduced daytime crime by
40%.

But “bopping” kids — the term BPS uses when
officers check a student's warrant record — became an
unmanageable task. Officers were forced to lug around a stack of
printouts 5 inches thick detailing records of about 65,000 students
in the Boston area. Once they spotted a possible student ditching
school, truant officers would have to flip through the stack of
paper to locate the kid's name and information. But Boston is a
windy, rainy and snowy city — try thumbing through a 5-inch
stack of paper then.

Earlier this year, Nextel Communications and AirClic, a wireless
software and services platform provider, approached the school
district to ask how it could help. “They talked about how
unwieldy their program for truancy was,” said John Redman,
senior communications manager for Nextel in Boston.

Nextel — whose Direct Connect phone service was already in
place to facilitate communications between Boston school officials
and the police — immediately went to work with AirClic. The
companies developed a Java-based application that allows attendance
officers to connect directly with school databases for instant
access to student information such as parents' names, outstanding
warrants and school schedules. In addition, officers can now
immediately call parents to notify them of their kid's truancy. And
the stack of paper printouts is now a thing of the past; instead,
AirClic's Web-based software service uses what the company calls
“Smartcodes” — either a student's name or bar
code on a student ID — to access critical information with
the touch of a button.

Since announcing the initiative, Nextel and AirClic have
received calls from school systems around the country interested in
the application. BPS is now researching new programs, including one
in which students are scanned when they step on a bus to make sure
they belong there. The technology could also allow school officials
to scan students going in and out of school, and from class to
class, to prevent them from walking out the back door once they get
into the building.

And what do students think of all of this? The buzz around
campus is that cutting class is now an option only for the
extremely brave — or the extremely stupid. Phil Jackson,
director of alternative education with BPS, chuckled: “It's
pretty amazing how fast word of mouth is.”

Copyright 2002 by Primedia Incorporated. All rights reserved.
www.primedia.com

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