Gone are the days of a raised and hand and simple "Present." Now students in one school district must submit a fingerprint to be counted in morning roll call.
The Washington County school district in Florida has a little problem with inconsistent attendance. After weighing their options, school officials decided to place finger scanners at the entrance to Chipley High School, where incoming students are scanned in each morning. Because most kids in the district ride buses every day, and because keeping track of everyone in the halls is difficult, the system will be moved to select buses for a trial period to determine if it's a more efficient way to save time and to ensure students are accounted for from the time they arrive until they're dropped off at home.
The program has been in place for about two months, and so far, attendance is up--but not everyone is happy about it.
Identity theft
There are questions about the security of a device that reads a fingerprint, "which is a unique, identifiable piece of information," and then "stores it in a database, and links it to a name" (Kelly Hodgkins, Gizmodo). Being that the students are mostly minors, it's a legitimate concern, and one that Washington Co. Schools Superintendent Sandra Cook is quick to dismiss: There are only four or five points recorded in each scan, which are translated into a 60-digit passcode. "We can't go backwards with it. We can't turn around and take that number and recreate the points on a finger." (DailyMotion)
$$$
The scanners cost about $22,000. Per student, this breaks down to about $30 a year each, which is a problem for some parents, and an expense they say the school doesn't need. But Clay Dillow at PopSci thinks it'll all come out in the wash: "At $30 per student per year, the system isn’t necessarily cheap. But considering the uptick in attendance (which means more money from the state in many districts) and the inherent increase in accountability and student safety, it may well be worth the cost."
1984?
Even accounting for privacy, security and the cost, isn't it "kinda Orwellian that the school wants you to flash your fingerprint before you can learn"? And what does it say about the district schools? As Micheal Trei at DViCE comments, "it seems like a sad commentary if you need to treat students like prisoners to get them to attend."
But Superintendent Cook has no concerns. "When it's all said and done, we're going to find that this is going to be one of the most monumental things that Washington County has ever done," she says. And parents can always opt out by signing a waiver and having their children check in with a teacher each morning.
What do you think? Is it too "Big Brother" to ask students to scan a finger for attendance, or is this just an example of technology improving an inefficient process?
Sources:
Image: pcstelcom.com
The Washington County school district in Florida has a little problem with inconsistent attendance. After weighing their options, school officials decided to place finger scanners at the entrance to Chipley High School, where incoming students are scanned in each morning. Because most kids in the district ride buses every day, and because keeping track of everyone in the halls is difficult, the system will be moved to select buses for a trial period to determine if it's a more efficient way to save time and to ensure students are accounted for from the time they arrive until they're dropped off at home.
The program has been in place for about two months, and so far, attendance is up--but not everyone is happy about it.
Identity theft
There are questions about the security of a device that reads a fingerprint, "which is a unique, identifiable piece of information," and then "stores it in a database, and links it to a name" (Kelly Hodgkins, Gizmodo). Being that the students are mostly minors, it's a legitimate concern, and one that Washington Co. Schools Superintendent Sandra Cook is quick to dismiss: There are only four or five points recorded in each scan, which are translated into a 60-digit passcode. "We can't go backwards with it. We can't turn around and take that number and recreate the points on a finger." (DailyMotion)
$$$
The scanners cost about $22,000. Per student, this breaks down to about $30 a year each, which is a problem for some parents, and an expense they say the school doesn't need. But Clay Dillow at PopSci thinks it'll all come out in the wash: "At $30 per student per year, the system isn’t necessarily cheap. But considering the uptick in attendance (which means more money from the state in many districts) and the inherent increase in accountability and student safety, it may well be worth the cost."
1984?
Even accounting for privacy, security and the cost, isn't it "kinda Orwellian that the school wants you to flash your fingerprint before you can learn"? And what does it say about the district schools? As Micheal Trei at DViCE comments, "it seems like a sad commentary if you need to treat students like prisoners to get them to attend."
But Superintendent Cook has no concerns. "When it's all said and done, we're going to find that this is going to be one of the most monumental things that Washington County has ever done," she says. And parents can always opt out by signing a waiver and having their children check in with a teacher each morning.
What do you think? Is it too "Big Brother" to ask students to scan a finger for attendance, or is this just an example of technology improving an inefficient process?
Sources:
- Finger Scan Devices Coming to Washington County School Buses
- Are Fingerprint Scanners Really Necessary On School Buses?
- A Florida School District is Taking Attendance by Scanning Students' Fingers
- Florida schools are using fingerprint scanners to track students
- New Finger Scanning Programs Being Used At Washington Co. High School In Chipley
Image: pcstelcom.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAfAVGES-Yc
It seems like you can solve that simply by doing roll calls at the beginning of each class.
The students are already "surveilled", in that attendance is taken. The question is more should surveillance be done with humans in the loop or out of it? Is that the kind of culture we want?
What I can't figure out is, how did we ever have schools before the days of fingerprint scanners, ID cards, and other high tech gear? Is the quality of the education measurably better as a consequence? Do fewer students get kidnapped?
Frankly the "more money from the state in many districts" tells me this is a Prisoner's Dilemma sort of thing. There's $X million to spend on schools, which is allocated to the schools which can prove the highest attendance. One school uses a new technology to improve those rates, so gets more money from the pot. Less money goes to other schools, so they respond by using the same technology.
Once everyone has it, the proportion of money handed out reverts to the original level, except now there's the cost of maintaining all this near gear. The only benefit is to the companies which manufacture the equipment, and that's money taken away from education.
And this system helps precisely how? Are the students scanned all the time? What happens if one of the students leaves campus during lunch? In 2nd grade I remember skipping some special class and hanging out under an outside stairwell.
Vmax: "anyone who flies on a plane these days gets a full body scan and some even get a nice groping too"
Yes, and I nearly get nervous breakdown each time and have to force myself to do it. I last year even took Greyhound instead of a flight because I didn't want to risk breaking out crying again.
Plus, by every test which has been made public, the additional screenings have not lead to measurably better security. For example, getting a gun past security is as easy now as it was 12 years ago.
Do we then want to insist that all children carry GPS tracking devices? Then we'd know where they are at all times, right? That's the next level of security. But of course the child could just leave the tracker somewhere, so perhaps we'd need some way to avoid that, because we need to know exactly where that child is at all times... don't we? Embedding a tracking device inside a child: the next level of security. Now THAT would work, and finally the parents are fully reassured.
I've taken the examples to extremes, but you see how we'd gradually move from one system to the next, from a system which relies on simple head counts, to fingerprint tracking, to GPS tracking... etc. All because the previous level of security was considered imperfect. All the time you're trying to fix a problem which doesn't need fixing.
Would anyone be okay with GPS tracking devices permanently attached to the bodies of their children? Or failing that, cuffing them to their desks? Because that's what it would take to KNOW where a child is at any given moment. That's what it would take to prevent a child who decides to leave the school just walking out and going, should they wish to do so.
We do not need to know with 100% certainty where a child is. What we do need to do is trust in people, and trust in the idea that children do not just disappear - even if they truant from school they invariably turn up. If it's fear of abduction (which is a TINY risk, statistically), well it would take a lot more than fingerprinting to prevent such a thing - you'd have to send kids to high-security camps for that.
Can I imagine calling the school and having them not know where my kid is? No, because I cannot imagine ever calling a school and demanding to know where my kid is at any point in time. Why would I ever do that?
And let's say that I did need to find them, for whatever reason (are there enough reasons to justify installation of a $22,000 scanner?)... couldn't I just send my kids a text message and ask them to call me back?
The point is, Nick is gettin his back up about the whole loss of civil liberties, but the reason why we resort to harsh measures (harshness level debatable here), is because the current way of doing things is not working.
Here are three reasons for a parent to reach the school to find the child, off the top of my head: Suppose there's a family emergency, and the child has to be reached. Suppose the custodial parent is concerned about the non-custodial parent kidnapping their child. Suppose the child forgot to take his/her medicine to school that day.
I'm quite sure that's the case. However, each code stored for each user is unique and can only be created from one person's print. The fact that you don't have the visible lines and swirls of a fingerprint is irrelevant - what you've stored is data which can ONLY be obtained from a particular fingerprint. All you need to use it to match with another print is similarly encoded data for that other print.
Most people would say that the school data differs from the fingerprint data stored by government crime/security agencies, from the data associated with convicted criminals. This is because you couldn't find a fingerprint at a crime scene and visibly compare it with the prints in the school database - there are no prints stored, only encrypted data.
Right so far?
However, what is to stop someone finding a fingerprint at a crime scene and encrypting it in exactly the same way that the schoolchildren's data is encrypted, and then comparing THAT data with the contents of the kids' database?
You see, you don't need to store the full representation of a fingerprint in order to have something which can be used against you. You just need a unique identifier (the encrypted version of the print), which can be compared with other similarly encrypted identifiers.
If it's unacceptable to store the fingerprint data of innocent people, and most people would be of the opinion that it is, then it's unacceptable to store the fingerprint data of children, even if it's encrypted, because it can still be used in some of the ways that criminals' data is used.
If you can compare a live child's fingerprint with the school database to get a match, you can compare the contents of that same database with prints found at a crime scene, or with the whole of the criminal database, purely by encoding those prints in the same way.
Therefore by taking a child's fingerprints at a young age, you have the potential to store, for life, identifying data which can be used in the same way that the criminal fingerprints database is used.
Are parents made aware of these possibilities? I doubt it. Or if they are, do they trust the government not to misuse such data? Governments aren't know to be great at storing information and NOT using it for other purposes are they?
This is NOT a good thing.
This system is a way of recording who has used the scanner, not where in the world those who haven't used it might be. So when (as you say) 'the current way of doing things is not working', and fingerprint data is 'the current way', will you want constant GPS tracking of children?
Meanwhile, with this system you have a lot of fingerprint data of children, which can be used (potentially) as I describe in the above post.
Regarding civil liberties, perhaps this Benjamin Franklin quote may be appropriate:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Once you give up one freedom, it's much easier to give up others - you can lose a lot of freedom if you give it away one piece at a time.
I have one question for you: how do you measure "success" with the use of fingerprint scanning technology in schools? What is considered improvement over the use of traditional roll calls? Is that improvement quantifiable?
@Adrienne - kudos! Great topic for a post and discussion.
Lastly, to all Neatoramanauts: I'd like to remind everyone that we should be able to have a discussion about controversial topics. Differing points of views are fine, but let's keep the discussion fair and civil.
As for your 'conspiracy' comment, please read some TSA-related stories if you think that enhanced security measures are all about the benefits they can provide to law-abiding citizens.
Unfortunately I wouldn't expect you, freely admitting to having a personal stake in this technology, to be anything other than 100% biased - systems architect and programming director of the company is about as one-sided and closed-minded as it gets.
If you're happy with contributing to a society edging closer to more and more 'tracking' and 'enhanced security', so be it, but don't pretend you don't know that this kind of tech has great potential for misuse.
Alex, I'm definitely trying to be civil, but I do have strong opinions on this subject :)
It would be better is the teachers called the roll at the beginning of each class, that way there's no sneaking off after initial check-in and no extra $20,000 required.
That's what all of the schools I've attended and worked at have ever done and it seems to work just fine.
That said, I'd like to ask (in seriousness) his question again: What is the metric for success with a system like this? Is it simply improved attendance?
That said, there's a reason people find this topic scary, and it has nothing to do with your technology, its efficiency, and especially not you personally. It's a matter of public perception regarding fingerprinting or finger scans (whether or not an actual print is taken--as most people assume it is, though we're aware that your system only uses a few specific points of reference): The only time a person is ever required to submit a fingerprint for identification is if they've been arrested/incarcerated or have to file certain (generally unpleasant and/or highly confidential) legal documents. There's an inherent negative reaction to being fingerprinted or scanned in any capacity and it has everything to do with prior experience (whether first-hand or on TV or what-have-you), which is largely doupleplusungood, to continue the Orwell theme.
Unless a person is in a profession where he or she is frequently exposed to high-level security locks, then this sort of identification is out of sync with daily life; it can be jarring and offensive. Submitting to a finger scan feels like being booked-in, and this tends to freak people out.
So it's not you, it's not your company, it's not personal. It's 235 years of being a country that doesn't finger-scan its children. This is what you're working against, and I don't envy your position. I do, however, commend you for being patient and thank you for answering questions, because clearly there's a lot of information that's not evident even in the sources who spoke directly to school officials about this.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/09/schools-surveillance-spying-on-pupils
I'm trying to understand the setup. A school with 3000-4000 students (where you say this is being used) must surely have multiple entrances. My high school was that size and had at least 8 doorways.
That said, Chipley, FL is a rural county and not one of the large schools you're talking about. The entire district of 8 schools plus the Department of Juvenile Justice school has 3,400 students.
Assuming each scan takes 1 second, which isn't possible, then 3000 students takes 50 minutes to process. Since each station "has a staff member to monitoring the process", that's at least one staff hour spent on monitoring, and more likely two. You'll want students processed within a few minutes of arrival, so you'll need multiple scanners going.
With a manual system, teachers take attendance. Figuring 25 students in a "core" class (which is what Florida law requires) and two minutes per class, that's about 5 hours of staff time. (Four for in-class counting and one for accumulating the results).
That's a savings of three staff hours per day, or about a 0.5 staff role, or about $15,000 per year per large school of about 3,000 students. That's the best case scenario: you also need to factor in training, backup plans in case the hardware is broken, power is out, how to handle kids with a bandaged finger, etc. Overall I just don't see much savings for the school.
Do you have numbers otherwise? Is my analysis wrong?
When you argue "unfortunately as the school enrollment goes up, school staff does not", then you don't know that the Florida Constitution sets "limits on the number of students in core classes (Math, English, Science, etc.) in the state's public schools" between 18 and 25, depending on the grade. Staff must go up as enrollment goes beyond a certain point.
I think someone already addressed that point earlier, and I don't know what they're doing enough to debate it with you. I would say though, there's probably a little bit of psychology involved.
My point was that schools have an incredible responsibility: to look after children. In this litigious and incredibly paranoid and demanding world, if a parent comes looking for a kid, and that kid isn't in his/her seat learning, whose responsibility is it? Not the kid - he/she is a minor.
This hasn't been developed out of thin air. This was developed in response to a situation. Students in a lot of places have to produce photo ID to write exams, in order to prevent fraudulent test-writing (either by a friend or someone trying to make a buck). Essays are sold on the Internet. The response from the educational system is to tighten up security.
I've been in malls that have had cameras in their washrooms for years. In my high school (a number of years ago now), the second floor boys washroom had no doors on the toilets. There's privacy for you. The school could afford doors, but at some point in the past, they decided that it was preferable not to have doors on the toilets in that washroom. Loss of privacy is nothing new in schools.
Most of the schools mentioned in this article are elementary schools, and the core classes by Florida's constitution must have no more than 25 students in them. If the teacher can't tell who the fake student is during a test then there's a much more serious problem.
This situation therefore has nothing to do with the types of exam taking you are talking about, with photo ID and fraudulent test writing, and those points are clearly irrelevant.
I've been in a number of malls which don't have cameras - your point is ... ? And in my high school I held it all day rather than use the open door toilets.
In any case, this isn't fully an issue of privacy. This is a question of benefits and costs. What does the school system gain with this, and what does it lose? Are there alternatives which are more beneficial? How do you judge the overall success? How does one judge if this is more an issue of "ooh, flashy new thing!" than good education?
Since you have thoughts on this topic: how is a biometric system better than the current manual system?
Vmax says in his post, above, that there are alternatives options to biometrics, which presumably afford the same benefits. So why use fingerprints at all?
I would be interested to know: what are the health implications of hundreds of people all touching the same spot, one after the other, in a food consumption area (lunch scanning, mentioned above)? Are the units sanitised regularly?
Lastly, this is a relatively small, local scheme. What do you think the reaction would be if the government said that every child should now have their biometric data stored in a database? Maybe one, centrally administered database. Think how much time that would save - for example if they ever moved to a different part of the country. Why have lots of separate systems when you can have just one? Think of the benefits.
What about every adult too - why not? It would save time and money to scan everyone into a central database to avoid duplication in lots of smaller schemes. I wonder how well that would be received. I wonder.
What's the policy on disposal of the data when a child leaves school? Is their biometric data erased from the database? How about from the backups?
Vmax has said he won't respond to me, so perhaps someone else knows? Surely there is a detailed document out there, listing all the important points, which is given to parents before they decide whether they want their child enrolled in this scheme. Is that available online somewhere? Or does it exist at all?
http://fora.tv/2007/10/09/Naomi_Wolf_End_of_America
(bad audio first 2 minutes)