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School Board assures parents about fingerprint policy
By DEBRA LEMOINEFlorida parishes bureau AMITE -- The Tangipahoa Parish School Board attempted to clarify concerns Tuesday night over fingerprint scanners at school cafeterias that some parents fear would make their children's personal information available to Internet hackers.
Technology Director Jake Ragusa said he wanted to dispel erroneous information circulating about the school district's biometric scanners.
The devices take impressions of fingerprints. The scanners were put into operation at two schools during the 2004-05 school year.
A group of parents whose children are students at Loranger Elementary School had complained about the scanners and rallied other parents to ask that the devices be removed.
No objecting parents attended the School Board meeting Tuesday.
The new software that will track school lunches, especially the records required by the federal government for the free and reduced-cost lunch program, cost the school system $92,000, Ragusa said.
The fingerprint scanners themselves are optional and cost $1,000 per school.
Ragusa said the scanners are designed to help reduce paperwork for cafeteria workers and to reduce the risk of students losing their cards or forgetting numbers, which was how the former software program identified students.
Some parents were concerned about how the fingerprints are stored in the computer system.
Ragusa said the computer saves a set of points based on the fingerprint and not the fingerprint itself.
Those points are turned into computer programming language and encrypted on the cafeteria computers' hard drives.
Ragusa also said the fingerprint images taken during the scans in the lunch line are saved in a computer's random access memory and not on the hard drive. "The instant the computer goes off, it (the fingerprint image) is gone," Ragusa said.
He added that information cannot be resurrected out of RAM memory, but erased data from a hard drive can be restored to a degree.
Many parents objected to the fingerprint program, saying any information deleted from a computer's memory can be brought back.
The scanners and the new cafeteria software were tried out at last year at the Loranger school and D.C. Reeves Elementary in Ponchatoula.
About 98 percent of the students at D.C. Reeves went through the scanning process.
In other business, the School Board voted to call an election Oct. 15 to ask voters in Hammond Consolidated School District No. 1 to renew a 10-year, 3-mill property tax to support an alternative education program in the system.
"American Idol" finalist Lindsey Cardinale, a 2003 Ponchatoula High School graduate, sang three patriotic songs to open the School Board meeting.
The board typically opens its meetings with a patriotic song, the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic reading. Click here to return to story:http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/072005/sub_fingerprint001.shtml