Fingerprint scanner
to ID school children

Students in an Ohio public school district will be fingerprinted to identify them in lunch lines, raising privacy concerns among parents.

The Akron school board approved, 5-2, a request for $700,000 to modernize its cafeterias, agreeing to pilot the system this fall at a middle school, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

Board members were barraged with phone calls and e-mails from parents.

One board member who voted against the measure, Rebecca Heimbaugh, echoed some of the parents’ concerns.

“I do not believe that any parent or any student has ever had the expectation that in order to go through the lunch line or to buy a cookie or carton of milk that they or their children would be requested to first be fingerprinted,” she told the Akron paper.

Raymond Vasvari, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said school leaders must ensure the fingerprint images don’t end up in the wrong hands.

“The question remains – is there information that would be useful to someone and how can you be sure this information is not shared?” he said, according to the Akron daily.

Parents opposed to the system will have the option of acquiring an identification card for their children, and the system’s designers say the fingerprints will be deleted.

The system, which replaces the meal ticket method, puts students’ fingerprints into a scanner that creates a template of binary numbers corresponding to the unique patterns of each print. Students are identified in the lunch line by placing a finger on a scanner.

“I think we need to enter the 21st century,” said board member Linda Kersker, noting the system’s efficiency. “We need to move forward and not backward.”

Kersker said, according to the Beacon Journal, the stored templates could not be used by police in the same way they rely on fingerprints.

“I do not see this as much different than a photo ID,” she said. “It is simply more reliable.”

However, board member Curtis Walker, who voted for the system, agreed school leaders need to pay attention to privacy concerns.

“We need to watch this carefully and make sure the issue of privacy does not hurt us in the end,” he said.