The Hazleton Area School District in Pennsylvania announced Friday that it would provide more free school lunches to students. However, the school lunch program requires students to scan their thumbprints so that the government can track their purchases.
In this new practice, each student needs to put his or her fingerprint on the biometric scanner before receiving the free meal. The federal government introduced this biometric initiative to ensure that school districts are providing more free meals to students after giving out incentives, according to Citizen's Voice.
The administrators admitted that they aren't certain on the security of the data.
As expected, some parents who found out about the school lunch program scanning their children's fingerprints are against it.
"No child should have to have a body part scanned to get a meal! There was no problems with those swipe cards that we were never made aware of," one parent wrote on Facebook, adding that she would rather send her child with bag lunch than use the fingerprint scanner.
"Let us not allow our children to allow privacy to become a thing of the past. Our duty is to educate and protect them, not to catalog them like merchandise," parent Cara Roberts wrote in a letter to Mayor Richard Alcombright and to iBerkshires. "Our duty is to teach them to protect and care for their bodies. What message are we sending when we tell them their body is a means of identification, a tool for others to use to track them?"
The biometric payment system is not new or unique to the U.S. Some cafeterias around the world are using biometric scanners and found it more practical because children don't need to carry cash anymore, the lunch lines are shorter, and students on subsidized meal plans don't need to sign papers anymore.
