Update: We forgot to include the link before, sorry. It's in now.

Unfortunately, we are not making this up. We'll call it Ohio's dumb practice of the week.

Students in Akron will be fingerprinted beginning this fall to identify them in school lunch lines. The technology, instituted for security reasons and for bookkeeping purposes, is being used in Ohio's Garfield Heights district and in a sprinkling of colleges, universities, and businesses across the country.

Students' fingerprints will be put into a scanner that will make a template of binary numbers corresponding with the swirls and arches of each print. When students go through the lunch line, they will place their finger on a scanner identifying them based on the stored template.

The school board has received numerous complaints, and not only from parents. The ACLU, for example, has expressed concern that "the scans will be used to track students' eating habits."

Raymond Vasvari, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said systems such as the one adopted by Akron raise serious privacy issues. He said school leaders must take steps to ensure that the fingerprint images do not end up in the wrong hands. ''The question remains: Is there information that would be useful to someone and how can you be sure this information is not shared?'' he said.

The system will cost $700,000. It was voted on by the school board and approved. Did they even consider whether the money might not have been better spent on providing higher quality food, more free lunches, teacher salaries or after-school programs?