Haleyville Schools implementing finger scan technology

HALEYVILLE    -  A new method of student identification is being implemented for the new school year, where a finger scan will allow school personnel to access students’ meal accounts.
Haleyville City Schools will be joining other schools in the state in changing over to a bio-metric  finger scan system in order to better safeguard students’ meal accounts, stressed Child Nutrition Program Director Emma Anne Hallman.
“In the past, every child has their meal account, where they can deposit money to purchase extras (a la carte items like ice cream, chips, cookies and drinks not necessarily included with the lunch meal for the day.)  That will still remain in place,” Hallman assured. “We will still have our online system, where our parents can use a debit or credit card to insert money.  People can still send checks or cash with their student.”
Some of the biggest challenges faced by the school system in the cafeteria are speed and efficiency, as far as the rate in which students go through the cafeteria lines, Hallman emphasized.
“At the elementary school, we feed almost 400 students in 40 minutes each morning for breakfast,” Hallman stressed. “That’s not even including lunch.
“It’s chaotic in there. It’s loud. It’s a stressful environment.  We’re trying to take some of that away,” Hallman added. “When you have 1,600 students coming in and entering their keypad number, it takes a while. We have 1,600 students campuswide, not including teachers.”
In the past, students had to access their meal account at check-out by entering their unique four to six-digit number into a keypad, then pressing a green button in order to have their number accessed before they could proceed to the table with their meal, school officials said.
“That takes time. It takes memorization. It also takes the teachers working with their students to either pass out cards that (numbers) are written on or put it on a lanyard,” Hallman continued.  “Each teacher has their own system in place on how they distribute those numbers to the students.”
The new system, which cost $10,000, according to Hallman, will more than pay for itself through the savings of not having to print IDs for each of the 1,600 students in the HCS system, Hallman explained.
School officials and students have faced problems in the past with students forgetting their meal numbers which, in turn, causes a delay in the meal lines.  There are also language barriers with English-language learning students, according to Hallman.
Sometimes, a student may accidentally invert their number or give the incorrect number for their account, she noted.
“They have an account with money in it that belongs to them,” Hallman noted.
Sometimes, school officials receive calls from  parents for instance, that money had been deposited into their child’s account for school meals, but that money was already gone, school officials explained.
“Sometimes their child has gone through that $20, but sometimes a student has accidentally used the wrong number,” Hallman pointed out. “It happens on a daily basis that kids will type in the wrong number.”
The new biometric system safeguards the system so the finger scan makes the identification personal for that child, since every child’s fingerprint is different, school officials indicated.
“It’s a finger scan. It’s not a finger print,” Hallman emphasized. Students are encouraged to place their pointer finger on the scanner when coming to the breakfast or lunch check-out.
The new scanning system looks for new identifiers on the student’s fingers, accessing seven points where prints on the fingers cross each other,  that can be determined by a finger scan, and assigning a numerical value to each one of those seven points, Hallman explained.
“It will make seven unique points, so it doesn’t even take the entire fingerprint,” Hallman noted. “That is your lunch number that ties back into our system.  It makes it much safer than what we’re currently using.”
School officials will not have access to view the child’s finger scan, only the number of each of their access points, officials assured.
The new system, Hallman emphasized, does not scan the entire fingerprint, only the seven access points, which cannot be used on its own to identify a person.
All of the identification accessed through the finger scan is held in the school’s technology department, making sure, “what little information we have is safeguarded,” she said.
A finger scanner is being installed at the point of sale at each school, as well as the check-point for books at the elementary library, school officials said.
Once officials see how the finger scan goes at the elementary library, they will work to further implement the new system at other libraries in the system, educators said.
“The ultimate goal is we want to feed our students a quality meal in as efficient a way as possible,” Hallman stated. “Our ultimate goal is to let them enjoy their time in the cafeteria. Most of them have around 25 minutes to go through the line, sit down and eat.
“This is just one way we can help move that process along a little faster for them,” Hallman continued.
“If you’ve ever been in the cafeteria, especially on the first couple of days of school, it’s a madhouse,” Hallman pointed out.
Although the new finger scan system is available for all students at all grade levels, students and their parents can opt out of the system and manually key in their student numbers at the meal check-out area, school officials said.
Forms were sent to parents at the end of the previous school year to sign up to be a part of the new finger scan process or to opt out.  Those forms are being honored, Hallman explained.
“If parents turned it in opting out at the end of the school year and now decide to opt in,  please e-mail me,” Hallman stressed. Hallman’s e-mail address is ehallman@havc.k12.al.us.
Those who did not receive a form or fill one out at the end of the past school year and  choose to opt out of the new system need to fill out a  form located in the HCS Code of Conduct, which all students will receive at the beginning of the school year, officials said.
The school’s technology department has been working to install the needed software for the new finger scan system, so it will be ready for the first day for students on Wednesday, Aug. 7, Hallman explained.
A process is also underway to enroll all participating students for the new software, according to Hallman.
“I am a parent myself,” said Hallman.“I have two students within our system.  I would never recommend us use a company if I didn’t think it was safe for our students.
“There is no way for us to track this information. There is no way for us to recreate this information based off of the finger scan because we’re just getting seven points on a finger. We’re not able to see any of the other fingerprint-type lines.”