There's another question going around Mexico City: Is the government withholding what it knows about the missing students' whereabouts for political reasons?
Ten days passed before the Procuraduría General de la República (P.G.R ., Mexico's equivalent to the U.S. Attorney General's office, began an investigation into the students' whereabouts.
The district's residency office — whose duties include checking on people like Ms. Ponce — has new tools to monitor students' whereabouts, including a lease-tracking database to alert the office when a lease expires.
You can find management systems that monitor students' online activities; adaptive learning technologies, algorithm-based programs that detect students' proficiency and behavior and adapt instruction accordingly; biosensors that measure students' attentiveness and moods; biometric systems that track students' whereabouts.
The Ayotzinapa families have asked the President for a new investigation to be headed "by a special investigative unit under international supervision with two components, one to investigate in depth the students' whereabouts, and the other to investigate the charade carried out in order to deceive the families".
"School administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students' whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government," the institute said in a statement, referring to the amount of money lost due to unaccounted attendance rates.
This could, of course, simply be a way for the school to account for its students' whereabouts.
Students took turns manning the front desk and when a phone call came in it was very easy to tell a student's whereabouts just by glancing at the board.
Last fall, Margaret Stroud, deputy superintendent, sent a memorandum warning principals to "make sure that you do not have any students coded '99,' whereabouts unknown".
With the advent of biometrics, school officials have gone to ever more creative lengths to monitor and track students' activities and whereabouts, even for the most mundane things.
Since the first days of the movement, the media scrum had vastly grown, and the steps were filled with reporters querying students in French or German or British accents, often about the whereabouts of the student Emma González.
