January 28, 2005

Kids forget stuff. House keys, ID cards and lunch money are all likely to be left behind as kinds run off to school in the morning.

This potentially causes a problem when lunchtime rolls around and little Timmy or Tammy doesn't have money for a meal. To solve this problem, some schools around the country are using biometric scanners in cafeterias, says Brian Wong, a consultant at the New York-based International Biometric Group, a consulting and research firm.

Biometrics help schools speed up lunch lines, limit fraud, and bullying, and improve the U.S. government's National School Lunch Program, says Mitch Johns, president of Altoona, Pa.-based Food Service Solutions, a company that provides payments systems to educational institutions.

Food Service Solutions has installed its fingerprint payments system at 40 schools with 250,000 students, Johns says. "The goal is no cash in the lunch line," he says.

An added benefit is the funding schools receive for the National School Lunch Program, which allows children from low-income families to receive free or discounted meals. By requiring all children to use biometrics to pay, no one knows which students are receiving subsidies. "Kids in the high school won't allow themselves to be labeled and don't sign up for the program," Johns says. "The doctor's kid who may have $500 in an account and the kid receiving the subsidized lunch go through the same process."

The biometrics payments system also makes sure that only eligible students receive the free lunch. Students would be enrolled on the program before the start of the school year and have a fingerprint enrolled. The biometric makes sure that they are receiving the lunch and not having someone else use their ID or ticket.

"The use of biometric technology to discreetly keep track of which children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches is significant since almost a billion dollars out of the $6.8 billion dollars of funding for the program went to buying lunches for ineligible children in 2002, according to the USDA," says Wong.

In the Penn Cambria school district in Pennsylvania, 1,817 students are enrolled at five schools, says Brenda Bucynski, secretary to the Penn Cambria School District food service director. The district decided to deploy the fingerprint system because of its security. "We wanted something each individual student had that somebody else couldn't copy," she says.

The district has eight fingerprint readers at the five school cafeterias, Bucynski says. The system has been in place since 1999, and students are enrolled when entering the school district.

The Wilson School District in Eaton, Pennsylvania, decided to go with biometrics after its "paper and pencil" prepayment system became too time-consuming, says Pat Anthony, food service director for the district. "The popularity of the prepayment program, however, exceeded our capabilities of managing the extensive paperwork," she says.

Parents would prepay for lunches and students would then receive a four-digit personal identification number that they would recite to a cashier after receiving the meal. Student receiving free lunches through the National School Lunch Program also received PINs to prevent overt identification. The program was entirely paper-based and every time a student prepaid the roster would have to be updated, copied and sent to the cashiers.

The biometric program is not mandatory for the 5,154 students in the district, but it is popular. "Enrollment and participation in the elementary areas is quite high, about 98% of enrolled, with about 75% routinely using," Anthony says. "In the secondary areas, enrollment is about 80% with 60% using routinely." The school has 25 scanners installed at the five schools.

Johns introduced the first fingerprint payment system in 1999 and initially found the technology was not as accurate as vendors claimed. But the accuracy has improved and the school is not having many issues with accuracy, he says. The system costs $5,000 per lane, Johns says.

Some parents are leery of a fingerprint system at first, Johns says. But he says the schools explain that the fingerprint image is not being stored, just a mathematical representation of the image, Johns says. That digitized version cannot be used to recreate the original finger image.

Student reaction has been positive and kids "like the high-tech concept," Johns says.