Students in a Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with a computer chip to let their parents know if they are in school or skipping classes.

More than  20,000 students in the the northeastern city of Vitoria da Conquista have started using T-shirts with the chips this week. Coriolano Moraes says that by the end of next year all 43,000 public school students in the city will be using the T-shirts.

Parents are told when their children enter school through a text message and are alerted if they do not show up within 20 minutes after classes begin. It is the first city in Brazil and perhaps the world to use the system to protect their precious snowflakes with the same technology used to prevent cattle rustling.