Colorado school district fingerprint scheme on hold

We wrote two weeks ago about how Linda Stoll, Boulder Valley school district’s food services director, was hoping the district would use high-tech student fingerprint scans to make school lunch lines move faster. She also expects fingerprint scans to become the norm for gaining entrance to school buildings and possibly even taking attendance at the start of class. I’m a big believer,” she said. “It’s a foolproof system.”

Last fall, Stoll tried to start fingerprint scans at Boulder’s Columbine Elementary at lunchtime, but nixed it after parents and the Boulder County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union raised concerns about privacy issues and identity theft. The scans were part of an effort to improve lunchtime efficiency. The district last school year upgraded to an automated cashier system, allowing parents to pre-pay for student lunches and masking which students receive meal assistance. The downside is that the system requires students to memorize a six-digit code. Principals said young students especially were struggling to remember the numbers and long lines were squeezing lunch time. To fix the problem, the district turned to a biometric fingerprint-identification program which is used in school lunch lines around the country. The system translates a fingertip’s ridges into data points. The data points are stored and the actual fingerprint image discarded, according to district officials and the system’s manufacturer. The manufacturer also says the data can’t be used to re-create a fingerprint or by law enforcement to identify a student.

Local parents, however, were not convinced. Until there’s more parent support, Stoll said, the fingerprint scans are permanently on hold. “Our population was just not ready for it,” she said.