SAO PAULO, March 22: Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if they’re cutting classes, the city’s education secretary said on Thursday.

Twenty thousand students in 25 of the of Vitoria da Conquista’s 213 public schools started using T-shirts with chips earlier this week, secretary Coriolano Moraes said by telephone.

By 2013, all of the city’s 43,000 public school students — aged 4 to 14 — will be using the chip-embedded T-shirts, he added.

The “intelligent uniforms” tell parents when their children enter the school building by sending a text message to their cell phones. Parents are also alerted if kids don’t show up 20 minutes after classes begin with the following message: “Your child has still not arrived at school.”

“We noticed that many parents would bring their children to school but would not see if they actually entered the building because they always left in a hurry to get to work on time,” Moraes said in a telephone interview. “They would always be surprised when told of the number times their children skipped class.—AP