Florida School District to Implement 'Finger Scanners' to Identify Students?

Teachers in a Florida school district will have to memorize students in a way other than calling roll, because finger scanners are doing the job for them now.

When a student boards a bus in Washington County, he or she presses his or her finger onto a scanner registering them as present for the day. The school board decided to take this action when they saw conflicting attendance records.

But high attendance comes with a high cost: the system costs the district $30 per student per year. According to the Washington County District School's website, about 3,400 students are enrolled K-12. This means the district will pay more than $100,000 per year to operate the system.

Gizmodo also notes a potential privacy problem with scanning the student's fingers:

The scanner also captures your fingerprint which is a unique, identifiable piece of information, stores it in a database, and links it to a name.

Yes, parents can opt-out and request their children be tallied the traditional way. But still, it seems kinda Orwellian that the school wants you to flash your fingerprint before you can learn your reading, writing and arithmetic.

According to the local NBC news affiliate, the district will be testing out the technology on a few buses but plans to implement it in the whole fleet before the end of this year.