Updated

School officials in Nampa say they intend to use a new scanning machine to identify students buying school lunches.

The machine should be ready for secondary schools this fall and will replace the more traditional identification cards.

Nampa School District Spokeswoman Allison Westfall says the biometric scanner assigns a unique identification to each student's fingerprint.

Westfall says students will not be forced to participate.

Use of the finger scan has raised privacy concerns in at least one other Idaho school district. But designers of the scanner's software say there is no way for any fingerprint computer or expert to reconstruct a print based on data gathered in schools.