NIWOT — First-graders at Niwot Elementary School picked up lunch trays filled with noodles and chicken nuggets last week and headed straight for a confrontation between convenience and civil liberties.
Each student put a tiny, right index finger on an electronic pad near the lunchroom cashier. The biometrics system scanned the child’s fingerprint and deducted money from the student’s account to pay for lunch.
For Niwot Elementary – as well as for six other St. Vrain Valley district schools and a handful of Colorado districts – the biometric systems are safe, secure and cheap. It costs about $200 to install, and lunch lines move quicker without the hassle of lost meal cards.
Schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and West Virginia use fingerscans, saying students no longer have to worry about memorizing a student code to get lunch.
“When we wanted to come up with a way to speed our lunch lines along, this was the best solution,” said Shelly Allen, nutrition services director for the St. Vrain School District.
But while many parents have embraced biometrics, others have attacked it as a way to collect personal information – including re-creating their child’s fingerprints.
Michigan and Iowa have passed legislation preventing schools from taking electronic fingerprints of students.
In Colorado, parents and the American Civil Liberties Union last year stopped a Boulder elementary school’s attempt at piloting biometrics.
Most computer experts dispute the claim that a child’s scanned fingerprints are never stored, said Colorado ACLU executive director Kathryn Hazouri.
“That fingerprint follows the student throughout their career, and there is nothing to stop that information from getting into the hands of law enforcement or anyone else,” Hazouri said.
Schools say only an encrypted, digital representation of the fingerprint is saved, not the fingerprint image, which is discarded as soon as the transaction is complete, Allen said.
All the data is collected at each school’s computer and not shared with other computer systems.
“Our district is very strict about student information,” Allen said. “What is scanned here stays here, and it only relates to whether they paid for lunch today.”
The system allows children more time – as much as 10 minutes more – to eat during 20- minute lunch periods. Kids can also opt out of the program at any time of the year and use standard lunch cards, she said.
“I have no concerns about this system at all,” said Niwot Elementary parent Curtis Jones. “These kids are on such a tight schedule for lunch, I’m for anything that speeds things up.”
At least seven schools in the Greeley school district are using biometrics to help make lunch lines more efficient, district spokesman Roger Fiedler said.
“Once parents are informed about what’s going on and how it works, a vast majority like it,” Fiedler said.
But the ACLU is getting more complaints about the potential dangers of biometrics from parents, Hazouri said.
“Surely, there is another way to make lunch lines move quicker,” she said, “than something as intrusive as this.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
