Fenstermaker, Lafayette 911, and Navigation Electronics used GeoCue’s TrueView GO to map every school in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, room by room, for faster, smarter emergency response.
Published in LiDAR Magazine, Fall 2025, Volume 15, Issue 4
School safety plans have long relied on floor plans, staff knowledge, and building notes. In a crisis, however, these assets can be brittle: they go out of date, hide in filing cabinets, and quickly fall short when outside agencies, unfamiliar with the campus, arrive. Today, these tools are ready for an upgrade. By modernizing with digital mapping, districts can give first responders the clarity they need to act quickly and confidently when it matters most.
Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, decided to replace this vulnerability with a new operational reality: indoor digital maps that are standardized, searchable, and integrated directly into computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and frontline devices, so every responder sees the same picture and can be routed to a specific room as easily as to a street address.
That vision became concrete in summer 2025, when the Lafayette Parish School System (LPSS), Lafayette 911, and the consulting firm Fenstermaker became partners, enabled by Navigation Electronics, Inc. (NEI), to digitally capture every public school in the parish, room by room, and exit by exit. The technical backbone was GeoCue’s TrueView GO handheld lidar and SLAM system, a lightweight, colorizing 3D mobile scanner, built for fast, accurate capture of interiors.
Over roughly six weeks, Fenstermaker scanned the district’s schools at a blistering pace, often three to four campuses per day, then converted the point clouds into standardized, 2D indoor maps designed for dispatchability and situational awareness. These maps now reside where they matter most: in the CAD systems of Lafayette 911 and on the screens of patrol cars, ambulances, and fire apparatus.
“When you talk about kids and schools, they’re probably our most precious commodity,” said Lafayette Parish 911 director Craig Stansbury (White, 2025). “This is something we wanted to make sure we were able to provide for those first responders who are actually keeping the kids safe.”
LPSS superintendent Francis Touchet Jr. was equally direct about the stakes and the district’s responsibility: “Safety is our number one priority in the district. We budget appropriately to keep our kids safe. This new mapping feature with 911 is an added asset that is going to enhance response and action for the school.”
The Lafayette project is more than a local success. In 2025, Louisiana enacted the “Protect Our Children and Response Act” (Act 425), which recognizes the operational importance of preparedness and rapid response and mandates advance emergency mapping for all public schools statewide. Lafayette’s early adoption now serves as a model for how to implement that mandate quickly and well, with technology like the TrueView GO and workflows that scale.
Choosing the right tool for the halls
The technical lead for the project was Coy LeBlanc, MS, GISP, PWS, a remote sensing scientist at Fenstermaker and a PhD candidate focused on spatial intelligence and applied AI. LeBlanc’s path to TrueView GO was methodical. He explored alternatives, tested other handheld/mobile scanners, and kept circling back to the same core requirement: fast, accurate capture of interiors that would integrate cleanly with both BIM and GIS.
“We tested alternatives,” LeBlanc recalled. “When Mark Forsyth from NEI brought the TrueView GO to show us, it was super easy to use, so efficient. At that point we [decided …], ‘This is what we’re going to use.’”
The practical advantages were hard to ignore. The TrueView GO’s SLAM engine meant crews could move through long corridors, stairwells, and classrooms without GNSS and still produce a high-quality, colorized point cloud. The unit’s ergonomics mattered as much as its data: technicians had to keep pace in facilities that can sprawl like small towns.
The decision became urgent when Lafayette 911, after a period of evaluation, called with a challenge that would define the project’s tempo. “I told them we needed about 55 days,” LeBlanc said. “They sat on it, and then suddenly we had about 25. If we wanted the job, we had to move.” NEI delivered the hardware and training at remarkable speed, giving Fenstermaker exactly what they needed to start scanning without delay. “Mark did a half-day of training,” LeBlanc said, “and the next day we were scanning.”
William Poché, owner of NEI, emphasized how training and teamwork helped set the project in motion. “Mark and our team at NEI were proud to provide the training and support that helped Fenstermaker hit the ground running with the TrueView GO,” he said.
Field execution at the pace of summer
Mapping an entire parish’s schools requires meticulous planning and an uncompromising timeline. Fenstermaker scheduled scanning during low-occupancy windows: summer break, holidays, and planned closures, to avoid disrupting school operations. Coordination with school resource officers and facilities teams ensured keys, access, and escorts were available as crews flowed from exterior doors to classrooms and mechanical rooms, back down corridors, and into gyms.
The scanning routine became a rhythm. Technicians set and surveyed reference targets outside and along long interior axes, then re-traversed those targets during acquisition to strengthen alignment and georeferencing. Every time a technician reached a classroom, they captured ID at the source: a quick photo of the door nameplate and a record of the official room number. “We don’t want to have a situation where somebody who calls in says, ‘I’m in Mrs. Smith’s room,’ because things change and she may now be teaching on the other side of the school,” LeBlanc explained. Standardizing on room numbers and common names would later pay dividends in CAD searchability. Dispatchers and officers could type “Auditorium – Lafayette High” and be routed directly to the correct space.
With multiple teams working in parallel, Fenstermaker typically scanned a high school in four to six hours, a middle school in about three, and an elementary school in two to three. Most crews covered three to four schools per day. “We were knocking out three to four schools a day with the scanner,” said LeBlanc. “We were moving.” The fieldwork took place from June 24 through July 31, almost six weeks of intense activity supported by a rotating crew of four to eight Fenstermaker staff.
There were on-the-ground realities that only a project like this reveal. Summer is when custodial crews wax floors; timing mattered to avoid reflective surfaces and slippery hazards. Some campuses were in mid-construction, with temporary barriers and evolving floor plans. Law enforcement training exercises occasionally occupied wings that had to be avoided and then revisited. The team’s answer to every challenge was the same: communicate early, adjust quickly, and keep scanning.
From rich 3D to operational 2D that saves minutes
At first glance, a colorized point cloud of a gymnasium is a thing of beauty: rafters, bleachers, basketball standards, and exit signs captured as a textured, navigable world. But crisis operations demand something different. Dispatchers need a 2D map with room polygons, labeled doors, external windows, and exits that an officer can interpret in a heartbeat. Fenstermaker designed a data pipeline that honored both the richness of 3D capture and the practical necessities of dispatchable 2D.
The workflow began with acquisition on the TrueView GO, which produced an RGB point cloud straight off the device for immediate visualization and quality assurance. Data was then processed in LP360 Land, to extract all the geospatial information from the sensor into a digital point cloud. The team used Autodesk ReCap to produce RCP files, then drafted walls, windows, and doors in Autodesk Revit, where geometric fidelity could be married to an indoor schema. From there, they exported to ArcGIS Pro and Esri Indoors, applying a structure that emphasized the elements responders use most: room boundaries and IDs, corridor geometry, door and window locations.
Standardization makes mutual aid possible. When a call triggers a multi-agency response, officers from outside the parish don’t have to puzzle through unfamiliar campus code names or guess at the difference between “North Wing” and “Science Hall.” They’re looking at the same symbology, searching the same field names, and being routed to the same dispatchable locations as everyone else.
The indoor maps emphasize the small set of details that shave minutes off response times. “One of my passions is automation,” LeBlanc said. “How do we quickly extract 2D maps from point clouds? How do we make this faster without sacrificing accuracy? That’s where we’re headed.” Even as the first wave of deliverables went live in CAD, Fenstermaker was already exploring ways to reduce drafting time through AI-assisted feature extraction.
What “faster” sounds like on the radio
The value of indoor mapping is clearest when you imagine how it plays out over the radio during a crisis. Picture this: a threat is made against a high school, and within minutes law enforcement units from multiple agencies are rushing to the scene. Many of those officers come from outside the parish. They’re brave and ready to act, but they don’t know the building. They can’t tell the cafeteria from the auxiliary gym, or whether Room 214 is in the north wing or the south corridor.
Without detailed maps, incident command may have to rely on staging everyone at the main entrance, leaving responders to guess their way through unfamiliar hallways. But with indoor maps integrated into the CAD system, the story changes. Command can track room-by-room clearing in real time, and dispatch can direct units straight to a named location. Instead of responders storming inside to figure it out, the radio call becomes precise: “Unit 12, proceed to Room 214, south corridor. Use Door S-3.”
A medical emergency tells the same story at a different scale. Imagine a student experiencing a severe allergic reaction in an elementary school classroom on the far side of the building, near to a service driveway. In the old pattern, responders might charge through the main entrance, lugging gear down a maze of hallways while dispatch tries to reconcile a caller’s description with a decades-old floor plan. With dispatchable indoor maps, the responding crew is directed to the closest exterior door and then a left-right-left sequence to the correct room. They lift less weight, travel fewer steps, and arrive faster. In emergency medicine and in school safety, time is the metric that matters.
“The whole goal is to get our first responders in there as quickly as possible,” said Maj. Kevin Savant of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office. “We’re giving every responder real-time information that’s fresh and updated.” Lt. Brad Robin of the Lafayette Police Department underscored where operations are headed next: “Our communications division and our officers will be able to see in real time what the school looks like and where they need to respond. Next, we’re bringing in one of our camera systems to provide reality capture of the infrastructure to better aid in response and awareness.”
A mandate meets a model
Act 425, the “Protect Our Children and Response Act” requires advance emergency mapping for all Louisiana public schools, coordinated by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Education in partnership with the Louisiana Center for Safe Schools. Lafayette Parish didn’t wait for the ink to dry. Work began before the law passed, and the parish’s results now set a credible standard for implementation across the state. The collaboration between LPSS, Lafayette 911, and Fenstermaker demonstrates that such projects can move at the speed of summer break when the scope is clear and the tools fit the task.
The project’s momentum is already expanding. With public schools mapped and integrated into 911, Lafayette 911 has prioritized bringing in charter and parochial schools. Other parishes are evaluating the model. The same principles – quick-capture, standardization, and integration – apply beyond education. Hospitals, courthouses, jails, and manufacturing facilities are natural candidates, with appropriate privacy controls and governance. “Indoor mapping becomes an extremely valuable tool when you have agencies which are not familiar with area schools but need to be,” LeBlanc observed. “This affects law enforcement, EMS, and fire. Everybody needs to work from the same map.”
The distributor’s role: enablement at the speed of public safety
Big projects turn on small, fast actions. When Lafayette 911 compressed the schedule, Fenstermaker’s plan depended on immediate access to suitable equipment and rapid, practical training. That’s where NEI showed its value as a complete solutions provider: hardware arrived, hands-on instruction happened the same week, and crews were scanning the next day.
“Fenstermaker is truly setting the standard for how schools can and should be mapped, and the TrueView GO is the perfect entry point for that work,” said Mark Forsyth, Director of Sales at NEI. “We’re seeing projects like this become more common as communities recognize the importance of digital preparedness. Starting at only $25,550, the TrueView GO handheld scanner is lightweight, easy to use, and, with its SLAM capabilities, ideal for collecting accurate data indoors. It’s the right tool at the right time to help agencies and engineering firms deliver safer, smarter outcomes.”
William Poché agrees. “I want to congratulate Coy and his colleagues on the incredible success of this program. They chose the right technology for the job, and it shows in the results. Our partnership with Fenstermaker goes back more than a decade, and we are delighted to work alongside firms which are not only advancing geospatial innovation but also making such a meaningful difference in the safety and preparedness of our community,” he said.
Why a handheld SLAM system is the right tool
Indoor school safety maps demand full coverage of the building: narrow corridors, stair towers, classrooms with lab benches and fixed casework, storage closets, administrative offices with irregular geometry, libraries, and cafeterias. A tripod scanner can do this work, but with heavy operational overhead: setup time leads to less efficient workflows.
In contrast, a handheld SLAM system such as TrueView GO is built for interior capture. Technicians can acquire a typical classroom in about a minute, sweep a hallway in a pass, and stitch those movements into a cohesive, colorized point cloud. The learning curve is shallow: Fenstermaker’s team went from half-day training to production scanning in 24 hours.
“For indoor reality capture at the speed school districts need, TrueView GO hits the sweet spot,” said Miles Kelly, Business Development Manager at GeoCue. “It’s lightweight, easy to use, and powered by SLAM so teams can move room-to-room without GNSS and still deliver accurate, colorized point clouds.”
Color matters. In the office, RGB accelerates drafting in Revit and QA in ReCap; in the field, it aids technicians as crews confirm coverage. Even more important is that, after drafting, the data becomes a consistently labeled, searchable indoor map that CAD recognizes, and dispatchers can query without guesswork.
Lessons learned in the hallways
The Lafayette project offered a set of practical insights any district or A/E firm can reuse without reinventing the playbook. Coordinate early with janitorial and construction schedules; waxed floors and renovation barriers are real factors, and timing around them is both a safety and a data-quality consideration. Capture the canonical room ID at the source by photographing door nameplates; “Mrs. Smith’s room” is fine for yearbooks but not for dispatch. Keep people out of scans. Use exterior and corridor targets and re-traverse them. Draft what responders need most and resist clutter: geometry, IDs, doors, exits, windows, and common names for navigation safe critical time. And invest in automation thoughtfully. AI-assisted extraction can shrink drafting hours without sacrificing the interpretability that responders rely on.
The team’s discipline was matched by its sense of proportion. Not every project needs a photorealistic 3D twin for immediate operations. Fenstermaker continues to produce full 3D models for clients who need asset management or architectural planning, and the firm demonstrated a beautifully detailed 3D model of David Thibodaux STEM Academy as part of its early work. For emergency response, however, the product that matters is a 2D indoor map that is standardized and dispatchable, resident in CAD and capable of being routed to devices. Meeting these requirements changes outcomes.
Protecting sensitive information while communicating success
The Lafayette partners, LPSS, Lafayette 911, and Fenstermaker, took a conservative approach to information governance. The public deserves to know that schools are being mapped and that first responders have the tools they need. At the same time, the operational details of building interiors are shared only with authorized agencies. Imagery for public communications is carefully curated and reviewed to ensure no sensitive layouts are exposed.
This balance, between transparency about the existence of capability and discretion about its details, is increasingly the norm in school safety. It builds community trust while protecting the integrity of response plans.
From parish initiative to repeatable blueprint
Lafayette’s accomplishments are more than a compelling case study: they constitute a reproducible blueprint. Start with governance: bring 911, district leadership, school resource officers, facilities, and IT together to set scope, nomenclature conventions, and privacy rules. Choose the right capture modality for interiors at scale; handheld SLAM shifts the bottleneck from equipment to coordination, which is where it belongs. Plan the route through each campus with access in mind. Automate where it saves time. Then communicate the success to boards and parents without compromising security.
LeBlanc’s own professional arc mirrors the project’s ambition. He started at Fenstermaker in environmental fieldwork before moving into GIS, pursued advanced degrees, and now leads a team applying AI and machine learning to real-world spatial problems. “I fell in love with spatial data,” he said, recalling a formative moment at an Esri conference. The Lafayette schools project is where that passion meets purpose: a summer sprint that transformed analog vulnerability into digital readiness.
There were human moments during the project to remind the team that these are living spaces, not lab benches. A maintenance worker unexpectedly crossed a scan path, leaving a ghostly smear in the data and a gentle note to reschedule that wing. A sheriff’s training exercise occupied one hallway; technicians gave them a wide berth and circled back later. The pace was relentless. “If I was out there every day with them, I probably would’ve had them scanning every week,” LeBlanc joked. “However, clear communication and the technical advantages of the TrueView GO kept us on schedule and focused.”
The bigger picture: capturing reality to coordinate response
It is tempting to think of a “digital twin” as a photorealistic, immersive 3D experience, similar to a virtual field trip. Lafayette’s achievement reframes that concept for public safety. A digital twin becomes consequential when it is searchable, standardized, and present at the moment of dispatch. The workflow from TrueView GO capture to CAD-integrated indoor maps is the means to that end: faster decisions, clearer communication, and safer outcomes for students and staff.
This chain depends on fit-for-purpose technology, disciplined workflows, and responsive partners. Fenstermaker brought the design and execution. LPSS and Lafayette 911 brought the mandate and the operational need. NEI brought the solutions and training that turned a plan into a project overnight. And GeoCue brought a tool built for the hallways of real buildings and the timelines of real summers.
“TrueView GO is the ideal solution for school districts that need fast, reliable indoor reality capture,” said Kelly. “The combination of LiDAR, GNSS and SLAM technology, paired with three onboard cameras, makes it perfectly suited for indoor data collection.” That’s why Fenstermaker finished an audacious project within a compressed timescale and why other districts are taking notice. When the right people align around the right tool, the distance from idea to impact can be measured in school days, not years.
The payoff is heard in a sample of radio traffic that would have been impossible not long ago. A dispatcher keys up and says, “Unit 12, proceed to Room 214, Science Lab, south corridor. Use Door S-3.” The officer hits “route,” sees the same map that dispatch sees, and takes the fastest path from an exterior door to a particular room, not just a building. No time is wasted. The response becomes coordinated by design, not by improvisation.
Fenstermaker has fulfilled that promise: capture reality so that, when it matters most, responders can coordinate. The rest is iteration and scale, so that other parishes across Louisiana, under Act 425, can adopt the same approach and provide digital maps of every campus. The goal is simple: get responders in there as quickly as possible with real-time, fresh information. Lafayette’s maps aren’t just pictures of buildings. They’re a plan for how to move through them, together, when seconds count.
Reference
White, A., 2025. Lafayette first responders will now have access to interactive maps of schools. Why that matters., The Acadiana Advocate, August 9. https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/education/why-lafayette-la-first-responders-have-interactive-maps-of-schools-act-425/article_16387d54-ea91-48ca-9bac-ce6167f638e9.html