Desert Sands School District Testing Finger Print Scanning

Desert Sands Unified School District will try-out a new program to keep track of students taking the bus.

The school district is bracing to test a new finger printing technology on six buses that serve Ronald Reagan Elementary in Palm Desert and Colonel Mitchell Paige Middle School in La Quinta.

The hardware is known as the Biometric Observation Security System. By scanning a students finger data will come up indicating if a student is getting on the correct bus.

“So that if a young child got off at the wrong stop or an older child chose to get off with a friend instead of where they’re supposed to, we would know that and the bus driver could stop that from occurring,” said Superintendent Sharon McGehee.

Besides providing real time information on a child’s where-a-bouts, the scanning system can also call up medical information on students in case of a crash or some other emergency.

The trial period is expected to start in early December and run through the end of February at no cost to the school district.