Farmingdale School District officials are planning new policies for student identification cards. Currently, all employees and visitors who enter Farmingdale's Schools are required to wear identification. Employees wear a card bearing a photo of the employee as well as their name, and visitors are marked with a "visitor" card. Students are provided with identification cards at the beginning of the school year, but they are carried, not worn. Employees and visitors have been required to wear the card since last year as a safety measure, allowing the district to identify people in the school's buildings as authorized individuals. Students currently only use the card for lunch privileges or if they have to show identification for other purposes. The district is planning and developing new policies for these cards, which, in the future, all students in the district may wear.

Some of the programs may include using the card to store data and medical information about students, using them when teachers take attendance, as new legislation requires the district to have teachers take attendance every period of the school day; using them to access library books, and for students to be able to purchase lunch.

Assistant Superintendent Barbara Horsley said that the district hopes that the cards can be used for such purposes in the future, but they are currently just in the planning stages. Horsley said that the cards would certainly be beneficial on field trips, so teachers would need only to carry a palm-sized data device, scan the student's card, and see what allergies and/or medical conditions a student might have, in addition to any emergency contact information.

"We're hoping to move to a much more sophisticated card that has a chip in it that could carry a lot more information," she said. "Eventually, with the new mandate for the period by period attendance, it could be used for that." Horsley added that this would necessitate that each classroom that have an administrative computer.

The district is currently in discussion as to whether the students will be carrying or wearing the cards. Horsley noted that perhaps, in the future when the card has more uses, students will feel more comfortable wearing the card since they could use it more often.

Horsley noted that if a smart chip is put into the cards, there's no end to the number of things that it could store. She said that this would be particularly beneficial for elementary aged children, allowing them to store lunch money on the card. With such a program, parents could deposit money onto the card and children could use it to purchase their meals, not making it necessary for them to carry money.

Although some students, perhaps particularly the younger ones, would be apt to lose the card, Horsley said this is not a huge concern. As long as the student notifies somebody immediately, the information on the card can be made inaccessible through the computer. To help students keep track of the cards, the district is considering perhaps leaving them on the younger students' coat hooks, so they can put them on when they come in and leave them at the school when they go home for the day.

Horsley noted that the concept of having more advanced ID cards is still in the planning stages, and noted that it will be a costly, but beneficial, process.

"We're planning it over time," she said. "It is an expense, but everybody felt that the policy should come first. If we're going to start asking students to have the card, there has to be a board policy to back that up."