Students at Robert Moton Elementary School are using a palm scanner for
purchases in the cafeteria. Here, fourth grader Makala Butler scans her palm to
purchase lunch. (Barbara Haddock Taylor, Baltimore Sun / September 30, 2012)

They say system to pay for lunches is violation of privacy

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, The Baltimore Sun

October 2, 2012

Instead of paying for their lunches with crumpled dollar bills and loose change,
students in Carroll County schools are having their palms scanned in a new
check-out system — raising concerns from some parents that their children's
privacy is being violated.

The county is one of the first localities in
Maryland to use the PalmSecure system, in which children from kindergarten to
12th grade place their hands above an infrared scanner. It identifies unique
palm and vein patterns, and converts the image into an encrypted numeric
algorithm that records a sale.

Though the school system does not store
those images, some parents have complained about the implications of having
their children's hands scanned. About 20 percent of parents have declined to
participate in the program, said supervisor of food services Karen
Sarno.

"I didn't appreciate how they handled it," said Mike Richmond, who
has two children at Westminster's Cranberry Elementary School. He said that the
school scanned their hands before sending the opt-out form. "I'm concerned about
it. I know it's the way of the future, but it's fingerprinting, it's
palm-printing."

School officials defend the system, noting that the
algorithm is the only piece of data stored; it is used to identify a child's
account. If students opt out of the service, they give their names to the
cashier, who manually charges their accounts.

Sarno said the school
system's goal is to decrease the time between transactions. Children have
limited time to eat lunch, she said, and she often hears complaints that
children don't like waiting in a long line.

"We're doing whatever we can
to reduce that line wait and make the queue better," she said.

The
PalmSecure system is used in schools around the country, including in Louisiana
and Mississippi, where news reports say some parents also complained about an
invasion of privacy and the costs of the system. The Pinellas County, Fla.,
school system was the first to implement the scanner last year.

In
Maryland, Cecil County is piloting the system in two schools, according to a
spokesman there.

Khaliah Barnes, open-government counsel with the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that schools should have allowed
parents to opt in to the service, rather than out.

"With students, this
presents unique privacy threats," Barnes said. "We're talking about elementary
school students, and that type of technology can make children less inclined to
the rights of privacy. Imagine being tracked from age 8 to age 16, and then a
university continues to use it, it becomes old hat and makes them less inclined
to recognize privacy threats."

Barnes compared the biometric palm scan to
the full-body scans in airports, which became the primary tool for screening
passengers in 2010. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Barnes said,
EPIC discovered that, though the body scanners do not record images of
passengers, they do have storage capabilities.

The PalmSecure system is
currently operating in three Carroll County elementary schools, but should be in
every school within a year and a half.

Darryl Robbins, acting principal
of Carroll County's Robert Moton Elementary, which is piloting the system, said
that it has helped increase the speed of lunch lines and has shown added
benefits.

"Now that we've combined everything in point of sale, we don't
have students moving around the cafeteria and in that capacity, it's helped
increase student safety," he said.

Robbins declined to comment when asked
if he had been contacted by concerned parents.

Other point-of-sale
systems in state schools use a card reader or a PIN to access a child's account.
Sarno said that the drawbacks of such systems — especially for elementary school
students — are that the children tend to lose the card or forget the PIN. The
palm-reading system also eliminates the possibility of other students lending
out their cards or numbers to others.

An audit released in March said the
Carroll County school system's method of tracking student meal purchases was not
efficient. The school system only used a cash register to process meal
purchases, which the auditor said could lead to reporting and accounting errors
for student meals. Recommendations included researching a new cash register
system.

The palm-reading system is a remedy for this problem, Sarno said.
In the future, parents should be able to pre-pay electronically on their
students' accounts, as well as monitor when and what meals their children are
eating. Currently, they can only pre-pay for meals on a child's account through
a check.

"We have a better cash-handling control centrally," she said.
"And less daily cash being handled and putting more in a lump on the account,
there's less daily pennies and dollars. From a business standpoint, all that
documentation is being fiscally responsible."

The palm-reading system
will cost a projected $300,000, according to Sarno, for installation of software
and hardware in all 43 schools in the system, as well as in the central
office.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/blog/bs-md-ca-s...