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Wireless: To truants in Rome, SMS is the enemy

By Elisabetta Povoledo International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2005

Students in Rome are becoming guinea pigs in an experiment that uses cellphones to deter truancy.

Starting on Monday for about six months, when students fail to show up for class and the school has not been previously notified, a text message will be automatically sent to their parents' mobile phones.

"We haven't invented anything new - what's new is the instrument," said Ornella Bergamini, the school board official who coordinated the experimental project, which covers students aged 14 to 16 at four middle schools and eight technical institutes in one school district. That, she said, is "the most critical age for dropping out" and is usually preceded by repeated absenteeism.

The program is part of a larger interactive online portal for her school district. Text messaging, Bergamini said, lets parents know when their children were skipping school in real time. "It should be a useful deterrent," she said.

As cellphones have increasingly become a must-have for minors, cellular technology has rapidly evolved to intersect with many aspects of teenage life. Banned in many Italian schools during exam time because of their potential as a cheating device, cellphones, like other cellular and satellite technology, are now used to allow parents to monitor where their children are, and even how fast they are driving a car.

Even the antitruancy messaging system has precedents. In Australia, England and parts of Asia, similar systems are being tried. In Australia at least, according to news reports, schools have seen unexplained absences plummet because of such monitoring.

Similar experiments have also cropped up in several other cities in Italy, where by law teachers have no obligation to inform parents of their children's whereabouts on a day-to-day basis. The teachers' duty is to report only if there is a suspicion that the students are skipping school.

"But it's on a case-by-case basis and depends on the good will of the teacher," said Alessandro Ameli, the national leader of the teachers union Gilda. "The responsibility that a child goes to school lies with the parent, not the teacher."

Mauro Mastriani, who devised the program for the Rome school district, said the directness of the mobile phone messaging would prompt families to communicate more. As a result, he said, "dialogue should be constructive for families, and students will have more incentives to go to school."

However, some educators are not so sure about the Rome initiative. Giorgio Rembado, the president of Italy's school principals' association, which has about 8,000 members, says the texting approach is too broad.

"The problem is that it's blind, and so it's potentially dangerous," Rembado said. "It's an automatic system that triggers an SMS that could throw families into alarm mode. You really need a filter that uses the technology intelligently."

But Bergamini argues that compared with current methods used by schools to advise parents of truant offspring - letters sent to their home or phone calls from the school secretary - the cost and time-effectiveness of short message service makes it an efficient alternative. "It will lead to immense savings," she said.

News of the experiment has prompted parents in other school districts to ask whether the message system could be used there as well, Bergamini said.

But she added, "We're not expecting that the students will accept this with any enthusiastic consensus."

Sophie Minchilli, a 15-year-old student in Rome, agreed, saying, "Parents may be happy about it, but I think it's a bit exaggerated."

Besides, she said, technology will not deter students who really want to skip school. "It will be harder, and fewer kids will do it because they'll be more scared," she said, "but it won't stop."

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Wireless: To truants in Rome, SMS is the enemy

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