Clear Creek trapping students into using PINs

IN the past year, Clear Creek schools began using a compulsory computer system for children's lunch money. Each student is issued a personal identification number. If they wish to buy lunch at school, they first must deposit their money in their PIN account. Little explanation was given by the school district, and the new PIN system was announced without offering parents an option to continue to use cash anonymously alongside the PIN system.

This constitutes a serious invasion of privacy by the schools and a loss of our children's rights to use cash.

First, the system is compulsory. The cafeteria refuses to accept cash without a PIN number. This is despite the fact that it says on our money: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." If the school does not accept cash for the lunch, it is breaking the law. The law doesn't say we have to have a PIN number. If retail stores began requiring an ID before they accept cash, their businesses would suffer dramatically because customers would object. What business is it of theirs who I am when I buy a cup of coffee or a book with cash? If we see the invasion of privacy in one case, why not the other?

What are the advantages of using cash? Cash is anonymous. Our privacy laws guarantee that it is no business of the government what we eat for lunch, how we buy our groceries or what movies we watch. Since the schools do not provide an alternative to the use of their PIN system, we have lost the privacy of cash. Do we really want to give up this privacy to a compulsory ID system?

Second, the PIN accounts are used to keep a record of the number of times each child bought lunch at school. This is necessary to send the periodic reports to parents about their children's accounts. But if the parents object, there is no recourse. I have told my children that they are not allowed to use their PINs and to tell the cafeteria worker that their mother said so. Just give cash. After a few weeks of this at Armand Bayou Elementary, the cafeteria staff got to know my children and just entered their PIN number themselves. In other words, the school is keeping records of my children's spending habits over my strict objections. This is a clear invasion of privacy.

The schools rapidly learned that fraud is not limited to adults: It was very easy for friends to exchange PIN numbers. The solution was to include a picture of each student on the IDs. Now our children have picture IDs as well as consumer records being kept on them by the cafeteria service. Parents have extensive papers to sign at the beginning of the school year concerning whether we agree to allow the school to use pictures of our children in school publications. Do we have any guarantee that the schools' food services contractor, Aramark, will not sell the PIN records to a consumer marketing group?

Third, the school has set itself up as a banking institution. Parents, as depositors, receive no interest on our money and have no guarantee from the federal government that our money is insured within the legal limit. The school does claim to issue periodic statements of the activity in our PIN accounts (although we have yet to receive one), but it has not offered any explanation as to the financial status of these accounts. Would you invest money in a business that didn't give you a financial statement?

Granted, it's farfetched to imagine the principal of my children's elementary shool taking their lunch money to vacation in Tijuana, or the cafeteria workers selling their ID files to telemarketers, but great invasions of privacy can occur when people don't defend their rights in small matters.

Not only is it an invasion of our privacy and a violation of our right to use cash, but our children, in grades as early as kindergarten and first grade, are placed on the front lines of the battle, having to argue with the cafeteria workers at the lunch register about their PIN numbers.

If the school opts to retain the PIN system, parents should be able to opt out. At the very least the administration could institute a cash only PIN that doesn't identify the buyer, and remove records from their files of families who object. I consider it a very serious issue that a food services contractor has, without my permission, obtained and used pictures of my children and is keeping consumer records of them, and that I am unable to buy them school lunches without using those records. I have no desire to have records of this sort kept on my children.

The school should be required to pay interest on our money or offer other discounts on lunches in lieu of interest. This is similar to buying gasoline. I can pay for gas by credit card, major credit card, debit card or cash. If I use a gasoline company's debit card, I am offered discounts in lieu of interest for the money I have paid the company in advance. And I still have the option of paying cash and need offer no ID.

A school should be held accountable under U.S. banking laws. If it is not willing to be considered a real bank, it shouldn't be in the banking business. Leave it to the banks.

And finally, however likely or unlikely scenarios of theft and misuse are, the issues of right to privacy and the right to use cash anonymously are too important to tamper with even in a minor way.

In the past, my experience has been that the Clear Creek schools have been very responsive to parents and work well with parents concerned about religious and civil freedoms. This is such an issue, and I am hoping for a resolution that we all can live with. Whether we like it or not, we are responsible as voters and citizens to object when our government takes on rights that we have not given them, or we may lose those rights by our inaction. In the words of an eighth-grader quoted on the Freedom Shrine at Space Center Intermediate, "The government has only the powers that the people give it."

Martin is a Houston mother of six children, who range from a first-grader to a freshman in college.

Actually, the real reason for the PIN is the liberal-emotional one: the free- or reduced-lunch kids might feel stigmatized by 'paying' for their lunch differently i.e., with a card, with a coupon, not giving the cashier anything (since she'll know who they are), etc. The Lefties, of course, saw this as an emotional catastrophe just waiting to destroy the fragile psyches of the poor, and had to force a system where everyone is the same: PIN numbers. Kids can bring checks or cash from home (which still gets lost and/or stolen before they get to the cafeteria, so that isn't exactly a working solution), while the poorer students have the state employees fill out their paperwork. They go through the line, put in their PIN "just like everyone else", and they don't appear 'different' from their peers.

Of course, the students STILL know who doesn't pay for their own lunch... and the overwhelming majority simply don't care, and most who do won't say anything for fear of PC police reprisals, and the bullies who would say something about it could always find something else to attack anyway. Once again, the Left successfully creates a problem while trying to solve another problem that doesn't really exist anyway... all to justify their existence.

HEY!! Free lunch kids ARE stigmatized!! Just ask my daughter.

Thanks to an SOB of an ex-husband and medical problems that kept me from working, my daughter was eligible for free lunch for a couple of years in elementary school. It affected her.

The notion of being poor so bothered the child that she graduated from high school at 17 with a 4 year scholarship, and EVERY SINGLE year since getting her BA, she's made more money than I have have.

Come to think of it, that free lunch thing is probably what kicked her butt to get into grad school.

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