Dive Brief:

• Student data privacy concerns impelled the state Education Department to create House Bill 1076, which mandates unique numbers be created for identifying Louisiana's more than 713,000 public school students.  
• The state's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has approved up to $1 million in spending toward making the ID plan happen by May 1, 2015.  
• The bill's application is expensive and time-consuming because it does more than just replace social security numbers with unique codes — it makes it illegal for the state to receive any identifiable information, like name and address, about a child. Violators could face fines and even jail time.  

Dive Insight:

The pricey plan, which Gov. Bobby Jindal is expected to sign into law in the near future, mandates that only schools keep personal information on students. The state's computers will check school data to make sure a student isn't enrolled in more than one school, but will never actually hold this information in-house.  

State Superintendent John White told the Times-Picayune, "This is going to be a system where the state essentially purges its databases of most everything that is used today to identify a kid."

While the plan is a giant step for student data protection, some still have concerns that it isn't enough and that local schools are still in jeopardy of security breaches. "Someone still has to maintain the database that contains the student's name and Social Security number," BESE member James Garvey told the Times-Picayune.  

Louisiana is one of the states that initially had a contract with the controversial, now-shuttered inBloom. Concerns about data breaches led to many states, Louisiana included, dropping their contracts with the company.