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Biometric bus

King David’s Henk du Preez performs biometric roll call on the school bus.

One of Johannesburg’s leading schools has installed sophisticated biometric security in its fleet of school buses to ensure the safety of pupils on educational, cultural and sports excursions. The school, which has several campuses around Johannesburg, has pre-empted legislation to improve monitoring of pupil transport by installing fingerprint readers on their buses.

A fingerprint template for each pupil is stored on every terminal, and each pupil entering the bus places a fingertip on the sensor to record the date and time. Because templates are synchronised across all buses, any pupil can be authenticated on any of the 13 buses.

The resulting passenger list ensures that teaching and administrative staff are aware at all times which of the pupils are on which bus. Until the new system was installed, teachers used a class list with roll call, which was time consuming and relied on teachers recognising pupils.

A security issue was identified by the school where pupils would take different buses on the return trip, or travelled home with parents. As fingerprints have an extremely low FAR (false acceptance rate) and cannot be lost, borrowed or copied, school staff can be certain of the identity of each pupil. There is also an accurate, permanent record of which bus was used to transport a specific pupil, as well as what time the child entered the bus.

“The entire fleet was scheduled for replacement in 2011 and we wanted a system that was both efficient and accurate while reducing administration for teachers,” reports Henk du Preez, transport manager for King David Schools.

“A biometric system was selected as the most appropriate authentication method and we approached various suppliers to test their terminals. The choice of the Uni550 from Uniclox was due to the speed of recognition. A fast terminal allows the children to enter the bus quickly and avoid queues.”

“Uniclox is proud to be associated with one of this country’s most respected schools,” concludes MD Raymond Noppe “We are pleased to know that our systems will be used to enhance the safety of South African school children.”

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