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Louisiana State Police proposes triennial school safety assessments, nine retired trooper positions and a dashboard
Summary
Paul Toups of the Louisiana State Police described a plan to institutionalize vulnerability assessments of K-12 schools on a roughly three-year cycle, add nine assessor positions (retired troopers), and convert paper findings into a real-time SDMI dashboard to help prioritize grants and improvements.
Paul Toups, the school safety training coordinator in the Louisiana State Police fusion center, told the task force the state should move from ad hoc assessments to a regular rotation of physical vulnerability reviews for K-12 campuses.
Toups described three pillars: (1) a central, uniform assessment form and data repository; (2) a proposed staff of nine Louisiana State Police assessors (retired troopers trained as assessors) located across troop areas to perform assessments and drills; and (3) an SDMI-managed dashboard to convert assessment data into analytics and priorities. “We just felt that it would probably be best for 3 years,” Toups said, arguing annual reviews exceed current staffing while five years is too infrequent.
Toups outlined the 2018 statewide effort that assessed roughly 1,800 schools, and said many of those assessments are now out of date: “They went in, they checked the boxes, but they weren't giving them recommendations back or option to consider to help harden the school.” His office is piloting an electronic intake with SDMI so completed assessments feed a searchable dashboard rather than remain in paper form or disparate spreadsheets.
Under Toups’s plan, the nine assessors would work from existing State Police troop areas, execute physical assessments, help with tabletop exercises and drills, and assist the Center for Safe Schools regional coordinators with training and follow-up. Toups said assessors also could help evaluate legislative offices and other non-school public facilities on request.
He told the committee the assessment instrument should be uniform; mismatched forms among providers create inconsistent analytics and weaken prioritization for grant dollars. He also showed examples of mitigation options — signage, access control, fencing, window frosting and ballistic laminates — and cautioned that laminates slow bullets and buy time but are not a complete ballistic solution.
Toups asked the task force to consider a statutory or budget framework to support the assessment rotation and the nine positions, and offered to return to give more detail on panic-button rollout and anonymous reporting integration with the Center for Safe Schools.
The committee and law enforcement members raised practical questions about staffing, who would fund remedial work identified in assessments, and whether data should be public. Toups said the dashboard and assessment files would not be public record because they contain addresses and technical security details. He proposed prioritizing grant recipients and assessing schools that applied for recent grants first.
Toups closed by describing the assessments as a way to buy time and prioritize interventions so local districts can make cost-effective, sequenced improvements.
