Parental Tracking With GPS

Legal Brief

Global positioning systems have become a staple of our daily lives, but the student tracking devices showing up on school campuses these days raise a host of legal issues.

These products, initially designed for senior citizens with dementia, now are marketed to parents of children with autism who may tend to elope. From the school’s perspective, there’s no problem with parents using GPS to monitor their kids’ whereabouts. Congress itself has promoted standards for voluntary use of this technology by adopting Kevin and Avonte’s Law in 2018, in memory of two autistic children who lost their lives after wandering off.

The problem is that some of these devices have a “listen in” feature that allows parents to eavesdrop on whatever’s within earshot of their child. That is where many school districts are drawing the line.