If Schools REALLY wanted to “take attendance for safety purposes”, they’d give the kids an ID and have them swipe like adults do.
First they came for the children…
Posted on 02/15/2024 4:28:20 AM PST by DoodleBob
Caribou High School has changed course and decided against implementing a biometric identification system to track student attendance.
Parents and guardians of students who attend the high school were notified Wednesday that Regional School Unit 39 has abandoned its plan to use a finger scanning system at the high school, which enrolls about 460 students in grades 9-12. The RSU39 district serves students from Caribou and Stockholm.
“Following careful consideration and feedback from our community, it was determined that the implementation of this system will not proceed,” Superintendent Jane McCall said in a statement released Wednesday.
Only 2% of parents opted out of the finger scanning option to track attendance, the district said, and confusion about how the system would be used is what prompted the decision to ditch the plan.
“One of the primary concerns expressed by community members and parents was a lack of clarity regarding the purpose of the system,” McCall said. “Contrary to some interpretations, the main objective of considering this possibility was to enhance safety practices for our students.”
“Maintaining accurate and up-to-date attendance records is crucial during emergency situations, and the system was intended to assist in this regard,” McCall said, adding that the manual attendance record kept by staff would have been used in conjunction with finger scanning.
McCall said there was a misunderstanding regarding the nature of the finger-scanning process. The superintendent said some community members believed the system to be similar to fingerprinting used by law enforcement. She said that was not the case with the identiMetrics system.
Finger scanning uses flat images of only two fingers to create templates, according to identiMetrics. The fingerprinting used by law enforcement captures rolled images of all 10 fingers.
“The identiMetrics system does not store actual fingerprints but utilizes data solely for identification and attendance tracking within the school environment,” McCall said in her statement.
In a message to the Caribou High School community on Wednesday, Principal Jamie Selfridge said the high school will continue to review its options for providing attendance record-keeping for its students.
“At this time we will not be implementing the finger scanning portion of the identiMetrics system at Caribou High School,” Selfridge said.
The decision to not use identiMetrics, which is based in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, comes a day after the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine criticized the district’s plan, saying that it would place students’ privacy at risk. The ACLU also filed a public records request seeking a copy of the contract and all communications between RSU 39 and identiMetrics.
A spokesperson for the ACLU said on Wednesday that it will move ahead with its public records request despite the district’s decision to abandon its plan.
Carol Garvan, the ACLU of Maine’s legal director, said she was pleased to hear that RSU 39 had changed course, but said her agency will continue to pursue its records request.
“We think public schools in Maine are not the place to use this type of system,” Garvan said. “We want to understand what led the school district to reach this decision, what kind of factors were involved.”
Garvan said the district could have been placing highly sensitive and vulnerable information about students at risk if their system was breached by hackers.
Garvan said RSU 39 would have become the first K-12 public school district in Maine to use fingerprints or other biometrics to track student attendance.
In an informational document posted on its website, identiMetrics said that schools in the United States and around the world have been using biometrics to streamline operations, increase the time available for teaching and improve school security.
SCHOOLS IN 48 STATES USE BIOMETRICS
The company, which was founded in 2002, says that fingerprint recognition is by far the most widely used biometric technology. Fingerprint biometrics have been used in United States schools for more than 20 years. Currently, more than 2 million students in 48 states use biometrics on daily basis, identiMetrics said.
West Virginia is leading the country with more than 70% of the state’s school districts using biometrics in their food service operations. The system is used to implement breakfast programs ensuring that more children are given the opportunity to eat a healthy breakfast.
Anil K. Jain is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Michigan State University with an expertise in biometric recognition and fingerprint matching.
Jain said that while commercial fingerprint identification systems are accurate and have safeguards built in to protect the database, there is still concern that the database could be compromised. He’s not sure that it would be wise to use a finger-scanning system in a public school setting.
“For this reason, we need to consider the security versus privacy tradeoff,” Jain said. “Is the school attendance system so vital that we need to use fingerprints stored in a central server? That is why, to my knowledge, not many schools use biometrics for attendance.”
He said a simpler solution would be to use an attendance system based on mobile phones, which almost every school student has.
“Depending on which phone they have, the student can confirm their attendance using fingerprint or face sensor built in the phone. This is similar to the way we use our mobile phone for payments. This approach will be a lot cheaper to install for the attendance system and the face/fingerprint images never leave your mobile,” Jain said.
If Schools REALLY wanted to “take attendance for safety purposes”, they’d give the kids an ID and have them swipe like adults do.
First they came for the children…
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Sure it doesn't........
Tempestuous tepottius
The falderal objection is seriously over hyped garbage. There is nothing wrong with the finger ID system and it does not produce fingerprints that could convict Black criminal students.
ID cards can get lost or stolen or presented absent a person.
I have used such a system to gain entry to the Y gym and swimming pool for years.
It doesn’t. The back door system on the devices do that.
This way they aren’t committing perjury in future court cases…
(Made up but maybe true)
I KNOW it doesn’t. I never believe a word of it when the government starts using some kind of tracking method and swears up and down that they do not store the data.
I’m sure the FBI is loving having this database of everybody’s fingerprints for their system.
“Sure it doesn’t........”
I keyed-in on that one too. Where I live, we’re now flooded with Flock License Plate Readers. While they tell us: “Don’t worry, your privacy is safe with us.”, they will fight TOOTH AND NAIL against any laws assuring privacy and then deletion of any data of this type they collect.
While I haven’t heard of any cases, I strongly suspect that many of the Jan 6th tourists denied being in DC that day...and then the feds showed them a picture of their car, with their plate, and asked: “Is this your car...”
Attendance should not garner schools money...successful education should. This is just a ruse.
Caribou Maine High School at the far Northeast corner of Maine on the Canadian border has an enrollment of 460 students (down from 520, 10 years ago). Everyone in town knows each other. If a kid skips class, their mom/dad will hear about by dinner time.
I dare say Dennis Hoey of the Portland Press Herald has never ventured to Caribou Maine.
Disclaimer, I have not been to Caribou since a family camping trip in the mid 1970s.
Those of us who grew up and went to school before computer technology, remember that the teacher used to take attendance, and they would count the number of students in the room, and make note of who is absent.
Why does taking attendance need to be done in a high-tech manner.?
Is this a business opportunity to sell these systems to schools?
and they would count the number of students in the room, and make note of who is absent.
No, it is certainly not a ruse. Taking the roll has forever been part of going to school.
Granted that education is the reason for schools. The societal need for education is the reason schools exist.
However, allocation of educational funds is currently made by governments on the basis of the number of students being educated at a specific school. For lots of reasons, that number varies from year to year and even week to week. To maintain a reasonable census of students, a day to day roll call is necessary. Although the truancy of a single student is not such a big deal, the sum of truancies of different students over time is.
I am surprised by the strong objection to the finger count. It effectively and quickly and permanently calls the roll. Not having to take a roll count and associated administrative paper pushing frees time for instruction.
The real problem is change. Some will always create reasons to object to change.
The issue isn’t opposition to change.
It’s the lack of honesty behind the WHY.
Consider “gun crime.” The left has championed “smart gun technology, “red flag laws,” “assault weapon bans” and so on, to reduce “gun crime.”
These ideas are rejected by normal people, because they fail the WHY test. The left’s stated WHY is “these controls will lower deaths without impinging on the rights of law-abiding citizens.”
As the meme goes, Sure Jan…sure…because there are scores of other controls that will WORK and most thinking people realize their WHY is a sham. To wit: almost every solution offered up by the left reduces liberty and empowers Leviathan, not to mention the control will fail.
Now, let’s turn to taking roll. I think everyone can get behind automating mundane administrative tasks to maximize value-added activities. But in this case, most people see the WHY as a sham as well. Why not swipes? Yes, the kids may lose their ID - well, then they go to someone in school who key punches their attendance into the database and Johnny brings his ID tomorrow. Like with firearms, the solution is unnecessarily elaborate and probably is a front for something, possibly more sinister*.
The same thing happened with Covid. The WHY behind masks, shutdowns, 2 weeks to flatten the curve, vaccine mandates, etc was a sham. That didn’t stop them.
* - I will agree, that perhaps a strong element of paranoia has entered into any such discussion nowadays. But, as they say, yesterday’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s historical fact.
No, the real problem isn’t change. It’s loss of freedoms and the surveillance state that cannot be trusted with personal data.
You are over thinking the issue.
The finger register is automated taking of the roll. Schools always take rolls, every day.
Smart guns have a liberty downside that is acceptable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.