Now, in the winter when kids have gloves on, will that tie up the bus making routes longer in time? Vendors never mention the logical thing that might destroy a sale.11-6-2010 California:
School districts are turning to high-tech solutions — from fingerprint scans to electronic cards — to track kids on school buses and keep them from getting off at the wrong stops.
The latest: A fingerprint scanning system, approved this month for testing at the Desert Sands district, northeast of San Diego. Students will be scanned as they get on and off the bus.
"Kids get lost. It happens in every school district, every year," says John DeVries, president of Global Biometrics Security, which developed the Biometric Observation Security System (BOSS) that's being tested.
It happened Oct. 13 when a Prince George's County (Md.) school employee took a 5-year-old student to the wrong bus and the student got off several blocks from home. "That just shouldn't happen," says district spokesman Darrell Pressley. He says the district is now considering a system.
With BOSS, students' fingerprints are scanned and sent to a database. When they get off, they provide a "check out" print. An alarm sounds if the child tries to get off at the wrong place.
The fingerprints are not stored, DeVries says. They are converted into a series of numbers that cannot be used to re-create the print, he says.
Margaret Gomez of Palm Springs, Calif., whose daughter, then 6, was let off a bus about a mile from her home three years ago, supports the idea. "Anything is better than what they have in place now," she says.
Other tracking systems include the ZPass from Seattle-based Zonar Systems, which uses a programmed card carried by students or tied to a backpack. It is in about 30 districts, including North Kansas City Schools and Illinois School District 128 in Palos Heights, company executive Chris Oliver says.
Paul Stephens, of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, says tracking students is reasonable, but the data could fall into unauthorized hands. "What if a child predator was able to get access to this?" he says. ..Source.. by Trevor Hughes and Michelle Mitchell
3 comments:
This is absolutely unnecessary RUBBISH. I hope it never gets adopted and implemented.
I think if we truly want to protect children then we should do just that. Put the money used for the Registry, all the GPS tracking devices used on Sex Offenders, everything into protecting children. Track their fingerprints, put GPS tracking in their shoes. All those who say "even if it just saves one" can't argue with that. Preventative measures are far more beneficial than Detective ones.
It's no wonder California is $20 billion in debt!
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