Students – whether vaccinated or not – were required to wear an ankle monitor for sports practices at Eatonville High School, in Washington state, in order to participate.
A mom – who wanted to remain anonymous – told The Post Millennial (PM), a Canadian news outlet, that “her daughter was at a practice for the public school’s volleyball team and texted her that she was being asked to put on an ankle monitor,” PM reported.
“The mother spoke to an employee in the school office, as well as a coach and was informed there was a meeting last week discussing the ankle monitoring program for unvaccinated teens. The program was allegedly designed for contact tracing in the event of a positive COVID test of a student,” PM added.
After PM wrote about the tracking devices, School Board Director Matt Marshall told them “that the school district has ‘shelved the devices until proper procedures including community input and board approval process occur.’”
The TraceTag device was developed by Triax Technologies, a Connecticut-based technology company that works primarily developing technology for the construction industry.
The Triax website describes the monitor this way:
Businesses are facing significant challenges in maintaining social distancing guidelines and they lack real-time insight into whether these guidelines are being observed in their facilities.
Leveraging our commercial solution for workforce monitoring we have developed a proximity alert and contact tracing solution – Proximity Trace – to address two key areas of assistance:
- Activefeedback to the worker, in the form of a visual and audible alarm, so individuals know when to adjust their current distance to a proper social distance.
- Passivecollection of worker interactions for contact tracing should an individual test positive [their emphasis].
The school’s volleyball coach reportedly told the mother “that the device would inform the players when they were too close together and was only used for indoor sports.”
The mother was told that parents could opt-out of the program, however. “The devices were not mentioned in the district’s back-to-school policies for fall 2021,” PM noted in its article.
The school’s athletic directors were also considering a tracking system for the football team. “A radio toggle, which would not have cellular or GPS capability would be placed on the football helmets and a local booster club was willing to pay for the system,” PM stated.
The school board would be considering the issue at their next board meeting.
Photo from Shutterstock.
