County schools go biometric

District says efficiency needs led to changes

by Anna B. Mitchell

Published: Sept. 18, 2009, 10:17 p.m.

By December, thousands of people working in Greenville County schools will likely pause before walking into and out of work to have their index fingers scanned by a small machine.

In a year beset by budget cuts, the school district has moved forward with installation of a $1.6 million financial software system it purchased last year. Officials say the software will make operations more efficient, more secure and more accurate. Called the Lawson Enterprise System, it replaces an antiquated business system that will lose support from its makers in 2013.

School district spokesman Oby Lyles said Lawson will be the accounting, budget, benefits and payroll backbone of the organization. A particular attraction is the Lawson system’s friendliness to tracking an employee’s hours by computer. At stake is the removal of human error, at the root of thousands of dollars in timesheet errors.

At the close of the school year, an internal audit found more than 100 mistakes in timesheets – mistakes that a computerized check-in system would all but eliminate.

“Electronic entry of time will result in more accurate records, eliminate paperwork and reduce the time required to process payroll from the school and district level by eliminating data entry by hand for some 4,500 employees who make at least four entries each work day, which must be calculated every 10 days for payroll purposes,” Lyles wrote.

The school district might decide to have employees check in with the click of a mouse. The finger scan offers advantages of speed and security if also more expense, depending on the level of durability of the machinery and depth of the scans. A basic finger scanner can be purchased for about the same price as a computer mouse (about $40 or $50), said Bud Yanak, vice president for marketing at Bio-Key, one of the nation’s largest producers of biometric software.

“The less you pay for a scanner, the less you get,” he said.

Greenville County Schools have not purchased any of the scanners yet and will make a final decision soon about what equipment they will use, Lyles said.

“They are just surveying the best places to locate the little box,” Lyles said. “We are just at the point of informing people about this right now.”

Biometrics have been used widely in the United States since the mid-1990s, Yanak said, with military and law-enforcement applications leading the way before that. Fingerprint scans take up two-thirds of the biometric industry, followed by face, iris, voice and vein recognition.

The industry is projected to grow to $9.37 billion in revenue by 2014, almost tripling the industry’s sales this year, according to a report from the International Biometric Group.

A finger scan works by gathering key points in the swirls of a person’s fingerprint and recording those – with each print unique to one in 200 million people. Scanners store just the key points and not the entire fingerprint, Yanek said.

“You can’t reverse engineer it,” he said.

Today, they are used at George Washington University Hospital, where a nurse or doctor can access appropriate medical records or drugs using a finger swipe (they used to use passwords). The MCAT exam board is also using them to keep test-takers honest, Yanak said.

“In the old days, it’s a three-part test, if you’re a student and not very good at Section 2, you can get a buddy to take it,” Yanak said. “That happened quite frequently.”

Day cares are using them to make sure the correct parents are picking up the correct kids. A youth center in Anderson is using a thumb scanner to track kids coming and going. AT&T stores use finger scanners for hand-held computers that employees carry around with them.

“Everybody thinks security,” Yanak said. “It’s really about convenience.”

Lyles said the school district has not ruled out widening the scope of finger scans, including the possibility of using them to track student movements in and out of school buildings.

For Greenville County Schools, the potential time savings in using scanners for employees is tremendous, Lyles said. More than 100,000 timesheets are processed by school secretaries annually for the system’s thousands of hourly employees – including cafeteria workers, bus drivers and janitors.

The Lawson software will also track and issue about 104,000 payments to the school system’s various vendors.

“In the long run, it will save you money,” Lyles said.

Contact Anna B. Mitchell at 356-8183

 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Comments

Add New

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."