Maine High School Ditches Biometric Student Scanning After MW Viral Report

A high school in Maine has opted to ditch a plan to using biometric fingerprint scanners to help staff keep attendance following a Maine Wire report on the school district’s plans.

As the Maine Wire reported exclusively on Feb. 2:

Caribou High School in Aroostook County (RSU 39) has contracted with IdentiMetrics to implement a system that scans students’ fingerprints, stores the data, and creates a tracking system so that administrators can have an easier time keeping track of the roughly 460 students.

According to a letter from school Principal Jamie Selfridge, the new biometric surveillance technology will be deployed for students this year.

“Starting next trimester, we will be introducing Identimetrics to assist with attendance and tardies entries into PowerSchool, our school’s student management system,” Selfridge wrote in a Jan. 24 letter to parents.

“[P]lease be assured that the new software adheres to strict privacy guidelines, and it will only be used for attendance purposes within our school environment,” Selfridge said.

Selfridge did not say what security protocols, if any, RSU 39 may be adopting in order to safeguard students’ biometric data.

IdentiMetrics’ website touts the product as a money-saving product for schools, claiming that the program can save districts thousands of dollars a year by saving school lunch programs the hassle of manually contacting parents about “problem student accounts.”

Although Selfridge didn’t say whether students will use the program to pay for the school lunches, this function does appear to be one of the primary uses for the fingerprint-scanning technology.

Selfridge reportedly sent a letter Wednesday to parents informing them that the district would be looking into other methods to make attendance keeping easier.

Look: You can read it a week from now somewhere else, or you can follow the Maine Wire on Facebook and read about it when we publish.