Florida schools testing out biometrics
13 March, 2009
category: Biometrics, Education, Financial
S.D. Spady, an elementary school in Florida’s Palm Beach County, has been conducting a pilot program using fingerprint readers in their cafeteria lines to access student lunch accounts without risk of fraud as well as speeding up the lunch lines, according to a Sun Sentinel article.
Due to the success of the pilot at Spady, School District administrators want to invest just under $200,000 in a contract with School-Link Technologies to implement similar systems in all their school cafeterias.
The new systems would serve as a replacement for the PIN and swipe card system that the schools already have in place. However, school officials have reported the potential for misuse of the accounts with those systems as well as issues with cards being lost and PINs being forgotten.
Additionally, other Florida schools that have already implemented such systems have reported the financial benefits of the system as they have seen rises in cafeteria purchases up to 17% in high schools. The Palm Springs School District is set to vote on the biometric implementation contract on April 8th.
Read the full story here