Fingerprint Technology Gaining Ground in School Food Service
Using fingerprints for ID, K-12 food service operators are speeding lunch lines, simplifying payment and improving reimbursement for programs linked to school lunch.
(PRWEB) January 19, 2005 -- Fingerprint technology is now being harnessed at
K-12 schools around the nation for school lunches. Students simply place a
forefinger on a small reader by the register. Public schools such as those in
the Penn Cambria and Wilson School Districts in Pennsylvania have adopted this
technology to speed operation; simplify payment; limit lunch fraud and bullying;
improve National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation; and to improve
reimbursement for programs such as Title I, E-rate, and No Child Left Behind,
which use NSLP food service
data to gauge poverty.
“Unlike cash, tickets and swipe cards which can
be lost or stolen, your fingers are always with you -- and no one can use them
to gain fraudulent access to your account,” says Brenda Bucynski, secretary to
Penn Cambria School District’s Foodservice Director.
Allaying fears of
identity theft, Mitch Johns, president of Food Service
Solutions, the company that implemented the biometric use of fingerprints in the
Penn Cambria School District as well as scores of schools and colleges
throughout the U.S., is quick to point out that his system does not store any
prints.
“Only the numbers are retained in the form of a mathematical
algorithm and those cannot be reinterpreted into a fingerprint image,” explains
Johns. “Both parents and students can rest assured that the images cannot be
used by law enforcement for identification purposes.”
“Biometrics
technology has brought much needed anonymity to our foodservice program,” says
Dr. Russell Strange, Superintendent of Penn Cambria School District. “Not even
the cashiers know which students are ‘free’ or ‘reduced,’ and the students and
parents have responded well.”
“For ten years prior to the system, high
school averaged 28.6% low income,” continues Strange. “Now in our fourth year of
using the biometric system, high school’s low income is 42.7%, with a four-year
average of 39.1%. High school is only 2% points below elementary low income for
2004-2005. The additional reimbursement enables us to provide higher quality
meals and more generous servings.”
“Teachers love that the new system
gets lunch money out of their classrooms,” says Bucynski. “One teacher says
she’s gained half-an-hour of teaching time a day, since she no longer has to
concern herself with lunch money during class.”
The Wilson School
District in West Lawn, Penn. turned to this biometric ID
technology primarily to expedite the lunch payment processing at the request of
parents.
“Parents didn’t want to doll out $1.60 for their child every
day, or give them a $10.00 bill and wonder if they’d ever see the change,” says
Pat Anthony, Foodservice Director for the Wilson School District. “Parents
wanted to pre-pay for lunch, but keeping track of accounts with paper and pencil
was untenable. And we didn’t want to buy into a system where parents would end
up taping PIN numbers to their kid’s hands.”
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/1/prweb199250.htm