SMS Kids Check-In System

This article on using cell phones as plane tickets got me thinking. Would it be useful to allow parents to somehow use their cell phones to check-in their children to kids programs at church?

Could a parent send an SMS message to the church as they’re arriving to somehow speed up or simplify the process? When they show up at the check-in area, the volunteers or whatever could have preprinted name tags and labels for the kid.

Then that same cell phone could be used as a contact method for the parent in an emergency. If a parent needs to be contacted, why not send a text message to the parent’s cell phone that they registered the child with?

It’d take some work to make it easy, but why not consider it? Doesn’t most everyone carry a cell phone anyway?

What do you think?