Titled:   Iris Scanning For New Jersey Grade School

Iris scans have become part of everyday life at a New Jersey school. Everyone that wants to enter the school has to provide a drivers license for initial registration and submit to a scan:

When a parent arrives to pick up their child at one of three grade schools in the Freehold Borough School District, they'll need to look into a camera that will take a digital image of their iris. That photo will establish positive identification to gain entrance into the school.

Funding for the project, more than $369,000, was made possibly by a school safety grant through the National Institute of Justice, a research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. "The idea is to improve school safety for the children," said Phil Meara, superintendent, Freehold Borough School District, on Monday. "We had a swipe-card system that operated the doors, but the technology was obsolete."

It seems crazy to install such an expensive, high-tech system for such a low tech purpose. If you wanted to gain access to the school to do harm, you would expect a criminal just to walk in with someone who is registered on the system, probably at knife or gun-point. The security system wouldn't know any different. And it would probably stop external responders from coming to the rescue too.

Wouldn't it just be easier to issue RFID keytags? Or are they obsolete too? Or an armed guard?