Touchless Face Recognition Attendance

[StarGlave]

In this day and age of COVID, we are trying to reduce contact of hands with equipment. We formerly used Attendance cards, but everyone touched them to find their card. We could use ID Cards with bar codes but people lose them. We could use fingerprint recognition but that involves everyone touching the same spot. A Face Recognition Program, like on my phone, would allow people to check-in without contact thereby reducing the possibility of spreading COVID or any other illness.

[Master Toby Milroy]

Hi StarGlave:

You know…we’ve had internal discussions about facial recognition attendance for several years now.

We’ve been a little hesitant to implement such a feature, although we’ve actually done a lot of research on it, and have stubbed out some proof of concept systems that have been interesting…but we’ve not implemented such a system because of the security ‘concerns’ we heard from parents when we surveyed them.

We talked with more than 500 parents of martial arts students, and found that more than 68% have ‘serious’ or ‘moderate’ concerns about having their children’s facial recognition ‘data’ captured and used in systems like this.

HOWEVER, we did all this research a couple years ago, and perhaps general sentiment has changed over this time??

I really appreciate your feedback, and we’ll look deeper into the current state of the market, and see if this is something we should consider more deeply.

Thanks!

[masterd20]

With the attendance software, Does it allow staff or parents to sign a child in and out?

Parents are asking for a program that does this instead of using a paper log sheet.

[Master Toby Milroy]

At this time, no, there is not a ‘sign out’ system for parents to check children ‘out’ of a class or camp.

This is something that is on our development roadmap, HOWEVER, PLEASE BE WARNED: one of the reasons that we do not have this feature ‘yet’ in our system is that in many states, the compliance landscape for ‘After School Programs’ is nuanced.

I don’t know how your school operates, or what programs you offer, but in some states, transported after school programs are allowed in a bit of a ‘grey area’, where the programs have to be considered a “Free to Come and Go” program (similar to the Boys and Girls Club etc…).

In light of this, “if” you are requiring students to ‘stay’ in the school, and requiring parents to ‘sign them out’ of the ASP…you may be in ‘non-compliance’ with this free to come and go exception.

I’m NOT a lawyer, and certainly not YOUR lawyer, but you may want to be thoughtful about your compliance strategy.

We definitely do plan to release a sign out system in the future, but there are some serious strategic ramifications for schools in some areas.

 

Thanks for the feedback!!!

 

[Master Toby Milroy]

This concept is getting some pushback from other entities.
Do you feel parents would object to this type of system?

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