Police in Iowa Schools Focus of New ACLU of Iowa Initiative

Des Moines, Iowa — The ACLU of Iowa has launched a new initiative to examine the status and impact of School Resource Officers (SROs) in Iowa schools. The investigation will conclude with a public report on its findings near the end of the school year.

SROs are becoming more common in Iowa schools, including some elementary schools. SROs are police officers, usually armed, tasked with patrolling schools and interacting with students. The stated goal is often to keep students safe, but there is no conclusive evidence that police staffing in schools increases student safety or prevents mass shootings. Instead, research shows that police in schools actually create harm for many students, taking situations that could be dealt with less harshly and feeding students—especially students of color and students with disabilities—into the juvenile delinquency and adult criminal court systems, the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. Read more.

ACLU of Iowa Legal Fellow Jacob Sarasin will lead the investigation. Sarasin, an attorney, is from Cedar Rapids and interned at the ACLU of Iowa while at Columbia Law School.

The project will build on previous work by the ACLU of Iowa to eliminate SROs in Iowa schools because of the many harms they create. This previous work includes development of a toolkit for parents and students to advocate for police-free schools. View it here.

This latest initiative will involve:

1. Obtaining and reviewing a host of public records to investigate and challenge abuses in Iowa SRO programs and to work toward transparency and accountability of these programs to empower families and communities.

The documents will include contracts between schools and police, SRO-related policies, SRO-related training, relevant complaints about SROs and school discipline, and federally required biennial reporting to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights regarding school discipline and discipline-related referrals to law enforcement, including those involving SROs. Details here. The information will be obtained with open records requests to schools and police, from local and national media reports, from school district outreach, and through federally collected data.

2. Sharing the findings publicly in a comprehensive report.

ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen said the project is timely and important. "The ACLU of Iowa is steadfast in our mission to advance equality and the freedom belonging to everyone in our state, including our public school students. While some school districts, taking a clear-eyed view of the data, have wisely discontinued their school resource officer programs, others in Iowa have added them, incorrectly equating having an armed officer on site with preventing tragedies.

"The need for this work and for communities having access to reliable, robust information to understand the harms of SROs has never been greater," Bettis Austen said. "We also hope that announcing this investigation will encourage Iowans to share their stories about SROs in their schools with us. And we hope that announcing this major investigation will itself deter practices and policies that harm kids or violate the law."

Sarasin said the findings can be used by schools and policymakers to better serve students. "Schools should prepare students for a bright future—not a future behind bars. Research demonstrates that SRO programs often exacerbate the existing school-to-prison pipeline. The goal of this initiative is to uncover the breadth of hidden, harmful effects that law enforcement presence in schools can have on students, especially those from marginalized communities. By shining a light on the disparate harms and inequities caused by law enforcement in schools, we hope to induce school districts across Iowa to reconsider the efficacy of their SRO program and find better ways of creating a safe and beneficial learning environment for all students."

As part of the project, the ACLU is seeking out stories from parents, guardians, teachers, students, and others about their interactions with school resource officers. Contact them by emailing legal.program@aclu-ia.org. The information will kept confidential unless you expressly authorize sharing more broadly.