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Finger ID System to Facilitate School Food Service
January 18, 2007
A Universal Finger Identification System (UFID) is being put in place for the Clintonville Public
Schools second semester that will simplify distribution of student lunches for food service. It will also
assure that the right student accesses his or her own meal each day.
The system will be used by the students going through the lunch lines.
Bob Engen, creator and president of Educational Biometric Technology, said that it protects the child’s
identification and fixes all the frailties of other lunch systems. It takes a reading from the child’s
finger, “which is always with him and never lost.” The child doesn’t have to remember a number or an
ID card, and no other student can use the number by mistake or by fraud. “Only the actual owner can
use it. Kids love it,” Engen said.
Clintonville’s Food Service Supervisor Karleen Brei said that the system cost of $945 “gave us
everything we need.” This includes the finger reader and the software that interfaces with the original
program for food service.
At present Brei is working to enroll the students at elementary level to have the program in effect with
the start of the second semester. Then she will move on to “enrollments” at the middle school and high
school level.
Enrollment, Engen explained, means pulling the student’s name up on the screen from food service.
Then the child puts his or her finger on a reader that takes a series of vector analysis measurements that
are stored. This is not taking a fingerprint, Engen said, and it is not taking the child’s identity. There
is a “huge level of anonymity between the kid and his identification.”
The child has to again place his or her finger on the reader to be found. “There is no way someone can
steal the finger,” Engen said. Only live fingers can be read. “A rubber finger won’t work because the
reader requires an electric impulse.”
Brei said that “the child has to be present to put the finger on it, so they can’t fake it.” It will do away
with other kids using someone’s pin number, the system presently used in Clintonville.
One of the reasons, Brei said, that the school district is using this is that a requirement for
reimbursement for lunches from the Dept. of Public Instruction is that the district be able to show that
each child that eats is truly the child entered into the computer.
Engen explained that all students in the U.S. get a subsidized rate on their school lunches, so the
federal government is demanding accuracy. This is a way to see that some children are not getting
multiple meals while other are not getting a meal.
A child can put his finger on the reader for a second meal, but the software gives a warning, and the
child is charged the full unsubsidized rate for the second meal.
Engen, who is based out of Caledonia, MN, but who has sold the system throughout the country, said
several things can happen when a pin number or ID card system are used. At the elementary level a
student may accidentally type a wrong number a get a lunch. At the middle school level students may
think it’s a funny joke to take someone else’s lunch. At the high school level students may do it to get
a free lunch. With finger identification all of these situations are avoided.
Last week Brei was working with the third grade class of Jean Giordana doing enrollments. She was
reading four fingers for each student, the index and middle finger of both hands. Though a school
system can choose to do only one or all 10 fingers, Brei said Clintonville made this choice for a few
reasons. Children can break an arm or hand and thus not have the enrolled finger available. In
addition, they often get cuts and put bandages over them, and this would prevent reading of that finger.
According to Engen, students may also have a preference for presenting a right or left hand.
Once a child is “enrolled” this stays with them through their senior year in high school, Brei said. “It
recognizes a child is going to grow, and it is stored as a mathematical equation, which doesn’t change.
It measures the ridges of the finger.”
Time is being taken doing the enrollments, Brei said, because she doesn’t want to interfere with
student instructional time. Thus she works out timing of class enrollments with each teacher.
Parents were informed by letter ahead of time and could opt out for their child if they wished. Only a
few have done so, Brei said. This is fine, because food service can continue to provide the other ways
of identification used in the past.
“The kids have been wonderful,” Brei said. “The kids are excited and can’t wait to use it. I think it
will be the program of choice.”
Engen said he started this biometric identification program in 1996, and it is an inexpensive and easy
way to prevent identity theft. The first place it was implemented was in a Minnesota library in 1997.
Now its most popular use is in food service, followed by libraries. He predicts that a growing
application will be for attendance. In addition, it has been used by school nurses to identify students,
for bus loading, for attendance at special events, for logging onto computers and for testing-
“anywhere where students need to be identified in a quick way.”
Over 300 schools nationwide are using this. In Wisconsin it is not big yet, though it is “coming on.”
“Clintonville,” Engen said, “is a leader in this technology in this section of the state.”
Engen’s company worked with Skyward out of Stevens Point, which resells this program as an
accessory to the food service system. “At Clintonville we hand delivered and installed it.” It works
with any Windows system without programming necessary.
Today’s product is not much different from that which Engen introduced initially. However, because
computer speeds are much faster today, for the lunch line, “it is near instant,” he said. “They simply
put a finger down and it’s automatic.”
Clintonville Tribune-Gazette
Nancy Wieneke, T-G Managing Editor
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