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.
Bet