Herndon, VA -- December 18, 2006 -- In recent weeks we have seen a spate of school related violence that has broken our hearts and made us more fearful for our children.

The violence has spurred an understandable hunt for better ways to protect our kids.

Yes, we may never be able to give them a 100 percent guarantee against irrational violence. But that doesn't mean we can't improve the odds. And as parents, we simply have to try.

The methods suggested have varied. A School Safety Summit convened by President Bush after the tragedy in Pennsylvania's Amish country, stressed such factors as ensuring each school has a viable crisis plan and training students to "tell" when they overhear threats of violence. Across the nation experts have suggested everything from teaching children to fight back against attackers to conducting impromptu safety drills with police in riot gear. It's important to explore all available avenues.

But largely missing from the national debate has been the place of technology in solving the problem. As CFO and director of mobile and wireless at a technology company during the national tragedy that was 9/11, I noticed something odd: I got an e-mail telling me precisely where my FedEx package was, but I couldn't verify where my company's New York employees were. Before I realized how localized the attacks were, I spent frantic minutes trying to locate my children at school to make sure they were OK.

As a society, we spend more time, energy and money tracking our "things" than we do our most precious resources, other people. I knew our priorities were greatly misplaced, and I decided to do something about it. I began a company called Defywire, with technology geared toward monitoring people without resorting to computer chips in children's arms or anything equally distasteful.

Today our technology, Mobile Guardian Safety Suite, protects a quarter-million kids in locations as different as Fairfax County, Va., and Brooklyn, N.Y. Like much of the 21st century technology we have come to take for granted, Mobile Guardian has been growing and evolving by leaps and bounds.

How does it work? It places data at the fingertips of teachers, bus drivers and school administrators via PDAs, or handheld technology. It monitors students' whereabouts from the moment they get on their little yellow school bus in the morning until they jump off into their parents' waiting arms that afternoon. Each step of the way, the adult in charge inputs the child's whereabouts as they change – getting on or off the bus, leaving the classroom for an excused doctor's appointment, etc. If the school is evacuated in an emergency, there's an immediate, on-the-spot record of each child's approximate whereabouts.

School administrators love it because they can generate a report about students who are piling up "incidents" – truancies, fights, etc. – which allows them to intervene before a troubled child turns to violence. It's great when kids report other kids who are plotting mayhem, but it's also great not to have to rely on that.

Is Mobile Guardian the total solution to the crisis? Probably not. The problem is so complex that we can benefit by coming at it from many different angles at once. But I offer technology in general, and ours in particular, as one more piece in a very complex puzzle that we simply must fit together. We already use technology to track our things. Let's use it to monitor our kids, including kids in danger and those on the brink of trouble.

Jill Stelfox is CEO of Defywire, Inc., a Herndon, Va.-based educational software company.