Biometrics As A Tool To Help Suppress Bullying

A Serious Issue

There is an epidemic occurring in our country within the school system that is jeopardizing the development of our youth, undermining their confidence and courage and scarring their minds.  It’s bullying.  Although bullying has been around for a long time, only recently has the subject garnered increased national attention as it was brought to light that a staggering number of students are taking their own lives and/or developing severe mental and social handicaps due to excessive bullying by others.   According to the NBC News “The More You Know” Web site, “Studies show that between 15 – 25% of U.S. Students are bullied with some frequency while 15 – 20% report that they bully others with some frequency.  As many as 60,000 students stay home from school on any given day because they are afraid of being bullied.”  These are staggering numbers, almost unbelievable.

The data on the NBC site goes on to say that “Children and youth who are bullied are more likely than other children to be depressed, lonely, anxious; have low self-esteem, feel unwell, and think about suicide. And young people who bully are more likely than those who don’t bully to skip or drop out of school, vandalize property, smoke, drink alcohol, and get into fights. Sixty percent of boys who were bullies in middle school had at least one criminal conviction by the age of 24.”  Bullying is a serious issue in our society and needs a remedy to stop it from occurring.

A Piecemeal Approach

Ask any expert on child bullying and they will probably tell you that there isn’t one definitive way for society to address the problem.  Instead, the problem must be addressed by instituting a multi-faceted, targeted approach that includes incorporating tools and resources that empower teachers, parents and other students to use in order to prevent a child from growing up to be a bully in the first place.  It is also important to look to technology as a means to assist with the prevention of bullying in schools, currently recognizing that there are proactive steps that schools can take to eliminate the motivations to bully and quell the channels for its growth.

Biometric Technology Is A Piece Of The Puzzle

So you may be wondering to yourself…what does biometrics have to do with helping to stop bullying?  You may or may not know this but biometric technology is increasingly being used in schools throughout the country as part of their lunch line point of service software to institute a foolproof way of positively identifying students and accurately keeping track of their purchases.  In a recent blog post about this subject, we detailed the spread of this technology and offered some insight on the science behind it.

Recently, we asked some of the school lunch line Integrators that we partner with to provide us with some feedback on some of the reasons that schools adopt biometric technology for their lunch lines.  Each time we posed the question, one of the top three reasons to incorporate biometric technology was preventing students from being bullied either to steal their barcode cards/PIN’s or harass a student who had forgotten his card or PIN while standing in line.

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Cloud-Based School Management System

Key Features:

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Biometric Technology Helps To Prevent Bullying

After personally speaking with at least a dozen school districts across the country who use biometric technology in their lunch line and asking them directly whether biometrics has indeed helped to prevent certain facets of bullying that are associated with the lunch period, 10 out of 12 districts responded “absolutely.”  The other two districts did not say no, they just weren’t sure.  This made us realize that indirectly, M2SYS was helping to curb the problem of bullying and acting as a spoke in the wheel of overall prevention.

We are proud of the biometric technology that we offer and its various uses across the vertical markets that we serve.  Impacting society in a positive way with our biometric solutions is just one more reason that we continue to encourage more schools, companies and governments to consider adopting biometrics for whatever their unique reason may be.

Want to learn more about biometric technology in a school lunch line setting?  Contact us at sales@m2sys.com, visit our Web page at www.m2sys.com or call us at 770-393-0986 and we will help to provide information on understanding the advantages and how the technology works.

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