Biometric Technology Means Never Having to Worry About School Cafeteria Money Again
By: Deanna McDuffie

With new technology, now there is no need for parents to provide school lunch money to their children. And, administrators don't have to worry about your students remembering a PIN number or keeping up with a lunch card.

For parents, it's a persistent and nagging problem: a child, provided with school lunch money, bypasses the lunch line entirely and spends that money at the corner store on candy and soda. Or, worse, the child has that money stolen by a bully and is forced to go hungry. A parent providing cash to a child has no control over what their child does with the money before it is properly spent on a nutritional school cafeteria lunch.

One solution has been PIN numbers or swipe cards, instituted in schools, that access personal accounts into which parents have deposited money for lunches. But, kids will be kids. PIN numbers are forgotten, forcing the school cafeteria staffers to look them up for the children and causing lunch lines to come to a stop.

The 21st-century resolution to this problem is biometric technology—the use of finger scan reading to access personal accounts set up in advance by parents. Already instituted in numerous school systems across the nation, it is solving a plethora of school cafeteria problems for both school administrators and parents.

“The parents have said that it's really great to simply deposit money and know it's there,” said Mike Tubbs, IT manager at JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano , California . “The kids don't have to take money to school, and parents can simply know that their children will be buying lunch every day.”

The school utilizes a biometric system developed for schools by Food Service Solutions (FSS) and has two point-of-sale readers set up in the school cafeteria.

JSerra's previous purchasing system, based on a child's student number, created many problems. For example, a student would provide their number to a friend, who would then pay the student for the food purchased, and the student would simply pocket the money. Or, other students would purchase food with another student's number.

Another successful implementation of biometric technology is in three schools in the Fairfield School District of Fairfield, Texas.

“The majority of parents here think it's great,” said Crystal Thill, food services director for the district. “They know their money is going for their child, instead of somebody else using their account.”

She continued, “Before we got this system, there were parents calling in saying, ‘My child didn't purchase that.' Of course, we had no way of telling whether their child purchased it or not, and we would have to delete the charge. Now, it's a given that the child did purchase items.”

Initially, there were worries from parents in both school systems of the “big brother” aspect that fingerprints would be stored and provided to law enforcement or other agencies without authorization.

However, the fingerprint is not stored as an image; instead, it is stored as mathematical information only.

“We explained to parents that the fingerprint is not taken as it would be in law enforcement, where it would be rolled in ink and pressed,” JSerra's Tubbs said. “It is simply a mathematical ‘map' of the fingerprint digitally stored, and it is used only here for school cafeteria purchases.”

Deanna McDuffie, M.Ed, is a school wellness consultant.