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Student card comes under fire

Taipei's electronic student card program, aimed at notifying parents of their children's whereabouts at school, met with criticism yesterday as some teachers and city councilors complained that the unstable system had only increased headaches for parents and teachers.

Electronic student cards, which have been used by 400,000 students at 240 Taipei municipal elementary, junior high and high schools since last month, combine traditional student cards with MRT Easy Cards, allowing students to use them as student identification cards, library cards and for public transport.

Instead of replacing the traditional roll-call system and promptly notifying parents of their kids' attendance, the system's high failure rate had only led to teachers spending more time double-checking students' attendance, they said.

"Sometimes students swiped their card, but there's no record of it in the system. We need to key in the information manually and take attendance, too. It's unnecessary," Su Hung-yuan (蘇宏源), a teacher at Taipei Municipal Xiyuan Elementary School, said yesterday at Taipei City Council offices.

According to statistics provided by Taipei's Parents and Teachers Association (PTA), of the 400,000 students participating in the program, the system failed to show card records for about 100,000 every day.

"The problem is that when the system shows that the student didn't swipe their card, we don't know whether it's a system failure or the student was indeed absent," Huang Chi-hung (黃志宏), director of the PTA, said.

The electronic student card program, which cost the Taipei City Department of Education NT$26 million (US$ 780,000), underwent a trial run in 2005 before formally being launched.

Besides recording student attendance, the department is due to introduce a new feature next month to send a text message to parents' cellphones when their kids swipe their card when arriving at or leaving school.

The service will cost parents NT$1.5 per text message, but the department will initially offer the service for free.

Lashing out at the department for adding to teacher's workloads and causing confusion for parents with the scheme, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilors Wang Chih-ping (汪志冰) and Dai Hsi-chin (戴錫欽) urged the department to improve the system's accuracy, while warning that the council would prevent the department from launching its new feature if it failed to improve on the current situation.

"A wrong policy is worse than corruption. The program wasted money and teachers' energy. The department should perform a full evaluation of the program before taking it any further," Wang said.

In response, Director of the Information Management Office under the Taipei City Department of Education Han Chang-tze (韓長澤) argued that systematic errors only happened in some schools, and the department had already fixed the problems.

"Systematic errors are inevitable. We are trying to fix them. The department still believes that it is a good idea," he said.

Furious over what they said was an inadequate response from Han, Dai and Wang insisted that they would question Department Director Wu Chin-chi (吳清基) tomorrow and demand he delay the launch of the new feature.
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