AP
Saturday, November 4, 2006

A plan to fingerprint elementary school students when they buy lunch has some parents worrying that Big Brother has come to the cafeteria.

The Hope Elementary School District around Santa Barbara has notified parents that beginning this month, students at Monte Vista, Vieja Valley and Hope elementary schools will press an index finger to a scanner before buying cafeteria food.

The scan will call up the student's name and student ID, teacher's name and how much the student owes, since some receive government assistance for food.

"It raises sanitary issues, privacy issues — it is kind of Orwellian," said Tina Dabby, a parent of two children at Monte Vista Elementary. "It just sounds kind of creepy."

School administrators said the idea is to speed up the cafeteria line. The same information is currently handled with old-fashioned paper and then transferred to computer so that reports can be compiled.

The annual reports are sent to the state and federal governments, which reimburse school districts for the subsidized lunches served.

"It's so archaic to transfer something from a sheet of paper to a computer day by day," Hope schools Superintendent Gerrie Fausett told the Santa Barbara News-Press.

A similar procedure already is in use in the Santa Barbara School Districts, where students punch a six-digit number into a keypad that calls up their name, photograph and other details, including whether they have any food allergies.