LA School District to Use Fingerprints to Identify Schoolchildren

LA Unified School District says plan will improve efficiency and speed up lunch lines, and eliminate the headaches of lost of forgotten money or lunch passes. They're already facing opposition by parents and privacy groups over the system, which has been banned in several states, citing "Making school children submit to fingerprinting, and risking the misuse of biometric information before they are old enough to drive a car seems like an absurdly risky and invasive way to get slightly faster lunch lines," said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union.

LAUSD says it will go along with the program despite opinions. Dennis Barrett, LAUSD's director of food services refutes any of the privacy issues, saying, "We carefully vetted this process... No one would be able to generate a fingerprint from this database."