A new study of school resource officers (SROs) by the ACLU of Iowa shows there are many problems with their presence, and Bettendorf is one school district that shows racial disparities in student arrests and referrals.
On Thursday, July 30, ACLU of Iowa released a 37-page report documenting the growing number of SROs in Iowa and the many problems associated with their presence in high schools, middle schools, and even elementary schools.
Between 2018 and 2021, the number of SROs nationally has increased by 23 percent. In Iowa, the study found, there are at least 130 SROs in 78 Iowa school districts. Today, about one-fourth of all Iowa school districts have at least one SRO.
The new report found there is no evidence that SROs actually keep students safer. ACLU’s survey of national studies could not find a single one that clearly demonstrated that having an SRO keeps a school any safer than a school without an SRO, including during tragic school mass shootings.
In fact, there is evidence that SROs can actually create harm for students by escalating a minor incident into an actual criminal offense (or juvenile delinquency case) that can impact a young person their entire life, said a Thursday press release from ACLU of Iowa.
“The stated goal is usually to keep students safe, and nothing is more important. But unfortunately, there is no high-quality evidence that police staffing in schools actually does increase student safety,” Rita Bettis Austen, ACLU of Iowa legal director, said in a July 30 media conference.
“Instead, research shows that having police in schools tends to create harm for many students. The presence of an SRO too often leads schools to respond to regular disciplinary and behavioral needs of students—which traditionally have been handled less harshly by schools and parents—by referring those kids to police,” she said.
“That can funnel kids—particularly Black students and students with disabilities—into the juvenile delinquency and adult criminal court systems.”
“And when kids interact with and enter those systems, it often can leave a lifelong mark on them,” Bettis Austen said. “For many, it causes trauma, depression, anxiety, and separation and isolation from family and other supports. The stigma associated with hostile police interactions, detentions, and arrests can result in an identity shift to being a 'bad kid,’ which all makes it more likely, not less, that a kid will struggle with ongoing adult problems and adult criminal justice involvement.
"That is the school-to-prison pipeline. We should instead be doing everything we can as a society to help protect our Iowa kids from those outcomes, to work to meet their needs, and to provide them with an educational environment that is truly safe.”
And this impacts many kids, as the report shows, “but disproportionately it impacts students of color, in particular African-American kids and kids with disabilities,” she noted.
“We at the ACLU of Iowa think we as a society should be doing everything we can to help protect Iowa kids from these outcomes and work to meet their needs. And when we're talking about school, we should be educating them.
“Our goals with this report is to support kids and families, schools, communities by giving them concrete information about what is really happening in Iowa and ultimately suggesting reforms that can address some of these harms,” Bettis Austen said. “And first and foremost, that starts with eliminating SROs altogether.”
If that is not feasible, she said school districts can take other actions that can safeguard students' rights, ensure parents are informed and involved require better training of officers and schools, require better assessment of how SROs are really functioning, what the outcomes are on a regular basis, and provide better accountability when problems arise.
SROs are police officers, who are often armed, and who are placed inside of schools where they interact with kids.
Sometimes, those interactions are the result of a referral by the school to law enforcement as a juvenile delinquency or criminal justice matter, and other times, interactions may be casual with law enforcement ostensibly serving as mentors, the ACLU release said.
The research shows while SROs are usually placed in schools to benefit school safety, that, unfortunately, isn’t borne out in outcomes. Instead, “SRO programs create harms for many students by treating what would traditionally be handled through normal school discipline, or what is the result of a student’s disability and unmet educational support needs, as criminal or delinquent,” ACLU said.
“While the harms can impact all kids, disproportionately these harms are being experienced by Black students and students with disabilities.”
To conduct the study, the ACLU of Iowa hosted a dedicated legal fellowship with attorney Jacob Sarasin (ACLU of Iowa Legal Fellow), who collected data from two main sources.
One was an extensive series of open records requests sent to 87 school districts and 67 corresponding law enforcement agencies, for a total of 154. (You can view a listing of the schools here.) Another main source was data collected from school districts by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR).
“The district-by-district data obtained through open records requests was used to understand how SRO programs are operating at the local level,” Sarasin said. “We relied on the OCR data to map overarching trends related to arrest and referral rates for different population groups."
Additional information was also used to create the report, Sarasin says. “To contextualize the findings of the data we received, we conducted a thorough literature review of empirical studies on the effects of SROs in schools. We also looked to the excellent past work of ACLU National and our fellow ACLU affiliates from around the country, particularly our neighbor affiliate, the ACLU of Nebraska, whose impactful model we sought to replicate in Iowa.”
- To see the report in full, click here.
- To see a listing of the communities that are cited specifically in the report, often with problematic SROS programs, click here.
- To see the actual open records responses from each school district, click here.
- To see a listing of what each of the studied districts reported to the OCR (number of referrals and arrests, broken down by race), click here.
By 2020, there were approximately 23,400 sworn school resource officers (SROs) in the U.S., according to a November 2023 report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice. About 11,500 (49%) of these SROs were employed by local police departments, 7,600 (32%) were employed by sheriffs’ offices, and 4,400 (19%) were employed by school district police departments.
During the 2021–22 academic year, approximately 45% of U.S. public schools reported having sworn law enforcement officers who routinely carried a firearm, according to a report published in July 2024 by the National Center for Education Statistics.
SROs disproportionately discipline and arrest Black students
Black students in Iowa make up 7 percent of the population but account for 13 percent of referrals and 21 percent of arrests, even though national studies indicate that Black students do not actually misbehave or commit crimes in schools at a higher rate.
This means that a Black student receives a referral at twice the rate of other students. A Black student is arrested at 3.7—nearly four times—the rate of other students. In Bettendorf, which has a total Black student population of 9% of all students, they saw 41% of all arrests and referrals from Black students.
The ACLU report (which studied the most recent school data available, in the 2021-22 school year), showed no arrests or referrals at all for the Davenport, North Scott or Pleasant Valley districts.
These districts were among 33 statewide that reported zero arrests and referrals the entire school year, the report says.
Bettendorf Community School District spokeswoman Celeste Miller said Thursday that the district leadership team has not yet had the opportunity to review the entire ACLU report and its data as it pertains to the district.
“As a district that engages in continuous improvement, we will carefully analyze the report and any potential opportunities for growth and improvement,” she said by email.
“The safety and well-being of our students and staff remain our highest priority. Our School Resource Officers work closely with school administrators and the Bettendorf Police Department to build positive, healthy relationships with students while helping maintain safe learning environments,” Miller said. “Together, we regularly collaborate on training, emergency preparedness, and continuous school safety improvements.”
Two Bettendorf Police Officers work in the Bettendorf Community School District -- while officers are primarily located at Bettendorf High School and Bettendorf Middle School, they provide support in collaboration with all leaders, staff, students, and schools, she noted.
Students with disabilities make up 13 percent of the student population in Iowa, but account for 27 percent of SRO referrals and 26 percent of arrests.
That means students with disabilities are either referred or arrested at 2.3 times the rate of students without disabilities. This demonstrates a broad failure to adequately accommodate challenging behavioral and educational needs of some students with disabilities within schools by instead foisting them on law enforcement who don’t have the tools to respond appropriately.
SROs often discipline students, including those in elementary school, for minor infractions traditionally handled better by school officials, the ACLU study found.
For example, the study found that students being caught vaping either THC or nicotine is by far the most common reason for SRO intervention. Vaping does not require an armed police officer to address.
The incident reports filed by SROs are likewise filled with their involvement with students calling each other names, pushing, spreading rumors, and other minor offenses, including for students being “disrespectful” in class, and even causing “drama with a group of girls.”
None of these incidents violate any laws and do not warrant law enforcement involvement. Some examples:
- In Perry, in two separate incidents, the SRO was called in to handle a 7-year-old boy “who was running through the hallway and becoming agitated with staff.” In another, the SRO intervened because a 6-year-old was “trying to destroy a classroom” and “being physically disruptive.”
- In Pella, an SRO became involved in the investigation of a 10-year-old boy kicking a ball at a 9-year-old girl and shaking a climbing net she was on.
- In Sioux City, a student taking a bag of popcorn on his way out the door was investigated as theft.
- Also in Sioux City, four 14-year-old boys egged a house, not on school grounds. SRO records are unclear, but indicate the boys were investigated and possibly even charged with criminal mischief.
SROs come at considerable financial expense
The average cost of employing an SRO in Iowa is at least $98,000 (which may or may not include benefits beyond wages, expenses, and other costs). Costs are often shared between districts and law enforcement agencies, with some districts carrying a smaller or greater percentage of total costs. By way of comparison, the base average wage for a school counselor, who could potentially head off student behavior problems before they start, is $70,015; the average teacher wage is $66,655.
The Des Moines Public Schools voted to remove SROs from the district in late 2021, which had cost up to $1 million a year. Des Moines moved to have one restoration facilitator in each of the district's five high schools. They are meant to help students solve problems and give them alternate ways to handle a situation before things get out of hand. Although SROs are no longer on campus, police are still called to Des Moines schools in situations where they are needed.
The ACLU study found that 78 percent of school districts do not have special SRO training requirements beyond what all law enforcement would receive. And 58 percent of law enforcement agencies, who provide the SROs to the school districts, have no formal, specialized training requirement for these officers entrusted with children in a school setting.
Almost half—44 percent—of districts were unable to produce a policy for notifying parents or guardians when their child is expected to be or has been questioned by an SRO. Roughly a third of law enforcement agencies had no parental notification policy.
“Iowa law requires notification of parents when kids are held in custody and questioned for suspected serious or aggravated misdemeanors, or felonies,” Bettis Austen said. “But because an SRO is often posted in schools and regularly interacting with kids, kids and their parents potentially face a wide swath of unclear situations.
"With SROs, you may have police talking to and questioning kids at schools in ways that parents are never required to be informed about, before or after the interaction–especially for more minor behavioral issues not rising to the level of a serious misdemeanor. Most parents would want to know about those interactions and likely believe they would be informed, but this report found in many schools, no policy or law would require that.”
One problem the ACLU found is a majority of the law enforcement agencies they contacted have no formal policy on special training for their SRO program.
“That's not to say that the SRO isn't being trained at all, but
what it is saying is that there are no clear requirements for
what training is needed on a yearly basis,” Sarasin said.
“The most common types of training that the police
departments and sheriff's offices that we contacted reported
their SRO taking were 3 different trainings: anti-bias training, de-escalation training,” and a national SRO training (the first two are required for all law enforcement across Iowa).
“What we found concerning is that the law enforcement training that the SROs are having does not necessarily adequately prepare them for the school environment,” he said.
“Much of the training is for an adult population, and the needs of an SRO, and the training requirements for an armed law enforcement officer in a school setting are very different than that for the adult population," Sarasin said. "Some of the other primary concerns that we uncovered in our research were that school districts often fail to routinely evaluate their SRO program and make necessary changes on an annual basis.
"Additionally, many school districts lack policies for notifying parents when their child is being questioned or has been questioned by law enforcement. Which is in violation of Iowa law.”
Sarasin also noted most school districts lack a clear mechanism for parents or students to lodge complaints that are specifically related to SRO misconduct.
Key recommendations for action
This report also makes a number of policy recommendations for school districts, law enforcement, and other leaders to take action.
“We want to support kids, parents, and schools with this report by giving them concrete information about what is happening here in Iowa and by suggesting reforms to address harms. This starts with eliminating SROs altogether.," Bettis Austen said.
"And if that’s not on the table in any local school district, schools can take other actions intended to safeguard students’ rights, ensure parents are informed and involved, and require better training, regular assessment of how SRO programs are or are not working in schools, and provide better accountability for problems,” she added.
The recommendations are to:
- Eliminate SRO programs. Iowa schools should follow the lead of other districts, such as Des Moines and Ames, who have done away with their SRO programs altogether because of the many concerns spelled out in this report.
That said, if school and law enforcement insist on continuing their SRO programs, the ACLU says they should implement the following important changes:
- Stricter training requirements for SROs so they are better equipped to deal with the special requirements of dealing with children in a school setting.
- More thorough reporting of SRO activities is critical to make sure that SROs are interacting with students appropriately, are not over-policing students of color and students with disabilities, and are not escalating minor behavior problems into criminal offenses.
- Measurable goals for an SRO program with regular monitoring and evaluation of those goals.
- Clear guidelines for SRO involvement, determining when it is appropriate for an SRO to become involved in a situation.
- Clear complaint procedures so that parents, students, and others know how to express concerns about an SRO program at their school.
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