Schools across the country looking for more efficient ways to track student's attendance, nurse visits, book check out and even school lunch payment are paving the way for vendors to provide fingerprint scanning and biometrics systems to increase efficiency.

West Virginia's Wood County became the first district to provide fingerprint scanning for payment of school meals. While this may alleviate the problem of lost lunch money, the new technology does not come without concerns and possible risks. Parents have expressed their concerns of identity theft as well as the technology having inherent civil rights issues attached.

The fears and concerns that these scanners are a civil rights violation are unfounded and is often the result of parents and others lack of knowledge regarding the technology. The fingerprint/biometric technology used at these schools do not store the prints in any FBI databases, nor would it be an easy task to forge another individual's identity. The physical fingerprint is not stored; it is merely a recording of "date points" of the finger and is converted and encrypted to prevent identity theft.

Schools that can use this growing technology can more effectively track meals funded by government assistance programs. Any means of making a school district more efficient while not actually increasing the cost should be considered a significant step. In addition, the time saved during standardized testing and other administrative needs can in fact increase the time available to teaching, another significant benefit of the fingerprint scanning technology.

It will be necessary for schools that seek to implement these new tools to host meetings for parents with the vendors in order to explain and demonstrate the technology before implementation. Vendors must work with school to establish an effective plan and cost benefit analysis to present to those groups and individuals concerned with the technology. In the long run, this new technology will spread beyond just primary schools and be an effective way to store individuals' information on statewide databases for more effective crime fighting and a safer America.