Bloomington High School North and MCCSC have introduced new ID cards this 2023-2024 school year. These cards and are currently being used to track and help students and parents who take the bus. But MCCSC hopes to take this further with a lot of potential use for attendance, game passes, and more.!  But does MCCSC have the resources? 

According to Principal Matthew Stark, the cards are a very useful tool for students who take the bus and their parents or legal guardians. Using the app Versatrans My Stop, parents are able to track their child based on where the bus is. Stark described it as “using Door Dash or Uber” for parents.  The app also helps students track where their bus is and when it’s getting to its destination. The cards track attendance for the bus giving accountability for who is on the bus, if anything happens to the bus with the kids, they would know if you took the bus that day or not. 

“When you, as a student, step out of these walls and use that technology (like Uber and DoorDash) as part of your life, some of it is now coming into school and we are finding ways to use this and the practice of using that technology in a more commonplace,” said Stark.

Stark and all of MCCSC are is trying to add this new technology to help students, staff, and parents, and that means using this new card technology in other aspects of school.

Using the new ID cards for lunch payments, classroom attendance, and game passes are  for now “not set in stone”  for the cards that will be applied to our everyday school lives here in the next few years. Lunch payments will go much faster than just being able to scan a card! Making the lines go by faster, making a more efficient lunch system. 

He also wants to use them for game passes like the currently $50 all-season game passes you can buy from the school, these can get you in the games. The plan is to be able to scan them and they connect to the game passes. 

As for classroom attendance, the idea is to be able to scan into class when entering and exiting the classroom each time, tracking when you arrived at class, left, and signed out for things like the bathroom. With that, they are able to see how long you were out of class and how many times you signed out. By using these IDs to sign out, they will also act as a hall pass.! 

Stark states that this is “not a gotcha moment, but more to clean up attendance” and save time in class for more important things. 

Shaun Caudill and Seth Sturgeon believe that it will take much longer to imply these changesto North, let alone MCCSC as a whole. 

According to Sturgeon, “We just don’t have the technology yet,” Sturgeon said. They say that there are too many apps and services that this would connect to making it much harder to all read to one RDF chip. 

Although it this will take more time than North and MCCSC prefer, the use of these cards is a big step into the future and shows the possibilities of the major technology developments in our everyday lives. that is and can be implemented in school.