(WOAI) The battle over whether the Northside ISD can force students including sophomore Andrea Hernandez to wear student i.d. cards equipped with an RFID ‘locator chip’ is far from over, lawyers for the conservative think tank which is challenging the program in court told 1200 WOAI news early Wednesday.

“We are going to fight it probably all the way to the Supreme Court,” John Whitehead, President of the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute said.

Whitehead says Andrea Hernandez, 15, who is a sophomore at John Jay High School, and her father Steven Hernandez, have a ‘sincere religious belief’ that being forced to wear the chip violates their rights to religious liberty.  Steven Hernandez has even gone so far as to call the RFID chip ‘the mark of the beast’ and says the school district is the ‘anti-Christ.’

In a 25 page ruling late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia upheld the authority of the school district to ‘further increase the safety and security its students and hopefully increase state funding’ by requiring all of the students to wear the RFID chip.

The school district says the purpose of the program is not to track students or record their movements or even use it to track their classroom attendance.  Pascual Gonzalez, the Executive Director of Communications for Northside, says the district simply wants to make sure students who are ‘in the building but not in the classroom’ when the opening bell sounds can be located and urged to take their seats.

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