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Students use fingerprint scanners to pay for lunch Bob Driehaus The speed-walking herd of ravenous Covington Catholic High School students hits the doors of the cafeteria seconds after the 11:20 a.m. bell signaled that the soup was on. By 11:35, all 170 students in the first of three lunch periods were through the food line, paid up and in their seats inhaling the hot chicken quesadillas, corn and nachos on Friday's menu. The scene might have been a typical one in any high school lunchroom except for how the students paid for their meals - not with cash or a debit card, but with their fingerprints. Covington Catholic installed three biometric scanners this school year that allow students to deduct money from their pre-paid accounts by placing a forefinger on a laser scanner.
(Article continues below) The lunch room's three cashiers staff computer terminals that bring up the name and photograph of each student and how much money is left in his account. After a couple of clicks that take a few seconds to complete, the money is deducted and the student is on his way. "It's working very well, and it's going to get faster," said Mary Lenihan, the cafeteria manager. "When you have 45 minutes of training, it's a baptism of fire." The school was motivated to make the high-tech change by teen absent-mindedness that found some students often forgetting their cash or debit cards and holding up the line while they searched, she said. "We chose the biometric system because the students need nothing. As long as they have their fingers with them, they're OK," Lenihan said, cracking a smile. The cost, approximately $15,000, was picked up by the school's parent club. The school is covering the annual maintenance fee of less than $1,000. The system offers parents a peek into what their sons are - and aren't - eating. They can log onto their sons' accounts and view what food they ordered each day over the last month, Lenihan said. The monitoring helps parents and administrators chart how well they are doing in the ongoing struggle to improve the teens' diets. There is a downside to that, according to Trey Marshall, a senior. "My mom loves it because I can't just take my lunch money and spend it on something else. It kind of stinks," he said. T.J. Devine, another senior, had misgivings about having his fingerprint profile in a computer. "I don't know if I like them having my prints. It's kind of creepy," he said. Technically, the prints are not on file, said David Pisanick, a senior account manager at Food Service Solutions, the Altoona, Pa., company that installed the system. It scans and records 27 unique points on a fingertip without actually recording the whole fingerprint, he said. It's a system that has barely hit Greater Cincinnati but has been growing nationally. The only other tri-state school with Food Service Solutions' system is A.B. Miree Fundamental Academy, a Cincinnati charter school. Since Food Service Solutions rolled out the technology in 1999, it has spread to cover 1.2 million students, Pisanick said. The trickiest customers are the ones with tiny fingers, Pisanick said. "The challenge we faced was having to identify the preschoolers through second-graders. We magnify the image before we process it," Pisanick said. Marti Davey, a Covington Catholic cashier for 13 years, was wary when she first heard the school was installing the system. "I was scared after using cash for all these years. But it's so much faster than the old system that now we can't believe we ever had to make all that change," she said. Austin Wise, a junior, said the system could move more smoothly. The problem? "Guys using cash slow things down."
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