By now many school principals, superintendents and administrators have probably heard of school lunch biometrics, or the use of devices such as fingerprint readers to recognize students and allow for the automated payment and accounting of school lunch purchases. Some may be wondering how to sort the promise from the hype, the information from the misinformation.
While school lunch biometrics can legitimately address a host of problems from slow lunch lines, lost lunch money, cumbersome payment, lunch fraud and bullying, to falling National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation, the devil is in the details. Of course, it all comes down to the bottom line: labor, cost efficiency, and return on investment (ROI). Here I'll honestly discuss the pluses and minuses of school lunch biometrics versus more traditional technologies so administrators can decide if it makes sense for their schools.
How do school lunch biometric systems work and do they protect privacy?
In most school lunch biometric systems, students place a forefinger on a small fingerprint reader by the register. In seconds, the system translates the electronic print into a mathematical pattern, discards the fingerprint image, and matches the pattern to the student’s meal account information. Food Service Solutions (FSS) biometric software, for example, plots 27 points on a grid that correspond with the fingerprint's ridges to achieve positive identification, but saves no actual fingerprint image.
