Schools seize efficiency of fingerprint scanning
WASHINGTON - The lunch lines in West Virginia's Wood County schools move much faster than they used to. After students fill their trays with food, they approach a small machine, push their thumbs against a touch pad - and with that small movement, they've paid for their meal.For half of the state's school districts, as well as hundreds more across the country, the days of dealing with lost lunch cards or forgotten identification numbers are over.
"A student cannot forget their finger," said Beverly Blough, the director of food service in Wood County School District, which in 2003 became the first district in West Virginia to use finger scanners.
But the emergence of finger scanning has also sparked a backlash from parents and civil libertarians worried about identity theft and violation of children's privacy rights. In several cases when parents have objected, school districts have backed down, and some states have outlawed or limited the technology.
A growing number of schools are using biometrics, or the science of identification based on physiological or behavioral features like facial or voice recognition, to have students pay for meals, log their attendance, board buses, check out books and visit the nurse's office. Administrators cite many benefits, chief among them efficiency.
Fingerprints are scanned, but the prints themselves are not saved; instead, a finger's ridges and arcs are turned into "data points," which are converted into a numerical identifier assigned to each student.
Pennsylvania-based identiMetrics, which offers biometric identification products, has sold fingerprint scanners to about 1,000 school districts in about half of the states, mostly in the Northeast and South, said Anne Marie Dunphy, the company's chief financial officer. By the end of the fiscal year, she expects the business will triple or quadruple over the previous year.
Dunphy said rural districts seem to be taking the lead on implementing the technology.
"You would think that it would be the technology-rich, wealthy districts along the Northwest corridor, and it's the complete opposite. We have installations in very rural areas in Indiana, where the backyard's a cornfield and there's an Amish lady working the cash register," she said.
But the technology's emergence has raised concerns for parents about whether their children's information is safe.
"It just opens a huge database out there that's just easy for identity theft," said Joy Robinson-Van Gilder, an Illinois mother who rallied legislators last year to place limits on the technology in her state. "I think it's against their civil rights, without a doubt, and it is an invasion of privacy."
Illinois is the only state that requires schools to get parental permission before scanning students' fingerprints. Iowa banned biometrics outright in schools, and Michigan doesn't allow fingerprinting because of a 2000 attorney general opinion that it would violate state law.
Arizona could join this group. Last month, a Senate committee passed a bill to ban the use of biometrics in schools.
Scanning opponents argue that districts don't have policies in place for what information to collect, how long to keep it, how to delete it when it's no longer needed and who should have access to the information. They also say that schools, unlike banks or major government agencies that also collect biometric data, don't have the financial resources to ensure that it is secure.
"The benefits certainly do not justify the privacy violations that we're seeing," said Alessandra Meetze, executive director of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I don't think collecting fingerprints from very little kids sends the right message. ... They're essentially treating (students) like criminals for the sake of efficiency."
Supporters of biometrics argue that privacy and identity-theft concerns are unfounded because the prints aren't saved and cannot be reconstructed. If a child went missing and the FBI needed fingerprints, the information recorded by the lunch scanners would not be enough to re-create the print, Dunphy said.
West Virginia's Blough said the cost of the scanners, about $700 each, matches the amount she had been spending on lunch cards and printing, and the process of recording meals, which often was inaccurate.
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