Police in Iowa Schools

We all want students to be safe from physical threats, and understand that students must both be and feel safe in order to truly learn. We also know that physical safety is only one part of student well-being. In order to create safe and successful schools in Iowa, every student needs not just physical safety, but a supportive learning environment and emotional and mental health support when they need help. In a time when many students are struggling to adjust after the trauma and disruption of school closures, social isolation, family economic hardship, and family loss or illness during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, holistic conversations and plans to create school safety are even more important.

Creating safe school environments for all students is a complex and ever-evolving goal, both in Iowa and across the country. One step that school districts in our state can and should take to move closer to this goal is ending full- or part-time armed police presence in schools.

Even though school safety is often the stated goal of school districts, research shows that having embedded police officers patrol their hallways does not actually make students safer. Instead, it leads to greater student alienation and a more threatening school environment. This is true even in the purely physical sense, as there is no conclusive evidence that police presence in school buildings reduces crime among students or prevents mass shootings.

Regardless of how well-intentioned they may be, armed police officers in schools create an environment more focused on law and order than on students’ social and emotional well-being. When working in school buildings, police do exactly what they are trained to do—question, detain, handcuff, and arrest. They treat youth like potential criminals instead of students, especially students of color and students with disabilities, feeding a school-to-prison pipeline and creating criminal records that follow students around for the rest of their lives. And criminal records make lifelong access to housing, employment, and social services much more difficult.

After George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, school districts around the country began reconsidering having local police officers working in their buildings as part of a nationwide reckoning with racial disparities in U.S. policing practices. These disparities carry over into school policing as well, with the school arrest rate of Black students being 3 times that of white students nationally according to a 2019 ACLU report. In Iowa, this disparity is even worse, and Black students are 7.7 times more likely to be arrested than white students according to the most current federal civil rights data.

In light of these disparities, both Des Moines Public Schools and Ames Community School District ultimately ended their school resource officer (SRO) programs in 2021. This shift in the school policing landscape occurred because students, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members shared their experiences with police in schools and pushed their district administration to consider the facts. 

This toolkit is designed for youth, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members across Iowa who want schools without police and are wondering how to make that happen. It provides resources to begin the conversation around the impact of police presence in your school, and eventually transition to a school culture that is safe, supportive, and does not require police. 

Inside, you will find background information, advocacy tips, and sample documents that you can use to create a plan that makes sense for your community. 

If you need help, or just want to share ideas with someone, you can always contact us at outreach@aclu-ia.org.

Data from a 2019 report from the national American Civil Liberties Union shows that school staff who provide health and mental health services to students not only improve health outcomes, but also school safety. In contrast, there is no conclusive data or research, the report found, that shows police in schools improve safety.

The report also found schools that employ more school-based mental health providers see:

• Improved attendance rates
• Lower rates of suspension, expulsion and other disciplinary incidents
• Improved academic achievement and career preparation
• Improved graduation rates

True safety in schools comes when students are supported, not policed. This means every school should have enough guidance counselors, social workers, nurses, and psychologists. Youth have the same needs whether they’re in a wealthy school district or in a rural or underfunded one where access is often scarce. 

Unfortunately, it is very common for school districts not to meet expert recommendations for the number of mental health professionals in their buildings. For example, the American School Counselors Association (ASCA) recommends that there be one counselor for every 250 students. In Iowa, the statewide ratio for the 20-21 school year was 1 counselor for every 370 students according to the ASCA.

School-based health and mental health providers are frequently the first to see youth who are not feeling well, are stressed or traumatized, are abused, are acting out, or who have an undiagnosed disability. A trained counselor or service provider in a school setting can provide expert mental and emotional support to students. Contrast that help and counseling to what a law enforcement officer is trained to do—detain, investigate, and arrest. One helps youth—the other feeds them into the school-to-prison pipeline.

A common secondary reason school districts maintain full-time police programs (commonly called school resource officer programs) is to provide students with a role model and support person when in crisis. While it is vital for young people to have adults in school that they trust, these “positive” relationships with school resource officers can be dangerous for youth, because anything they share with a police officer can be used against them or their families in a legal proceeding. 

Unlike educators and mental health professionals, police are under no obligation to maintain privacy or confidentiality. They don’t have extensive training to help young people through self-esteem issues, bullying or harassment, anxiety, depression, abusive relationships, immigration issues, substance use, gender or sexuality questions, or self-harm. The main tool they are trained to use is the criminal legal system, which can and does cause lifelong harm. Other professionals in the school district such as teachers, counselors, social workers, and psychologists, are better equipped to serve as role models and supports for students without the dangers police officers present.

Despite the well-documented harm of school police and lack of evidence that policing measures make schools safer, the use of school police and similar measures has drastically increased over the past decades. In 1975, only 1 percent of schools in the U.S. were patrolled by police officers. In contrast, a 2018 Urban Institute analysis found that nearly 70 percent of high school students and nearly 50 percent of middle school students in the U.S. attend a school with a police officer. And these numbers are likely an undercount because school districts and police departments sometimes underreport this information, even though it’s a public record that parents have the right to know.
 
Historically, the growth in police being assigned to schools has been driven more by national media attention about school violence and the availability of grant funding (federal and state) than by an actual uptick in violent incidents in specific schools or any evidence of the effectiveness of this approach. For example, a study examining school shootings in public K-12 schools between 1980 and 2019 found that shootings in schools with armed police had nearly 3 times the number of casualties compared to shootings in schools without armed police.

The increased investment in school policing in the 1990s through Community Oriented Policing (COPS) programs expanded the size and power of police in schools, which increased the harmful consequences to students. Then in the late 1990s, the school shooting in Columbine prompted even more federal funding for police in schools, resulting in more than 6,500 officers in schools, despite the aforementioned lack of evidence supporting increased police presence. 

By 2009, this number grew to an estimated 17,000, and it’s only continued to increase since then.

The presence of police in schools creates an environment of control and punishment, disproportionately affecting Black students and students with disabilities. Law enforcement officials of all types are trained to look for criminal behavior and to gain control of a situation. But no matter what amount of training they receive, they often harm, handcuff, arrest, interrogate, detain, or otherwise restrict the liberty of students. 

There are some differences in the types of security personnel that work in schools. Some common types include:

School resource officers (SROs): SROs are sworn law enforcement officers who may have completed different training than police officers who don’t work in schools. Regardless, SROs have the full powers of police officers and are often armed. These officers are assigned to work at a school or group of schools under an agreement approved by the school board. They are government employees.

Security guards: By contrast, security guards are not active police officers and rarely carry weapons. They may work for a private company and wear a uniform that is similar but not identical to a police uniform. They don’t have the ability to arrest or to use deadly force in most circumstances. 

Often, students don’t know if the person who checks their ID at the door, or who patrols the hallways and lunchroom is a police officer or not. You may need to ask questions to find out what type of officers are in your school district.

A designated presence in a school district also costs real money. Advocates can ask principals and school board members one simple question: what if this money was spent on educating and supporting students instead of investigating and arresting them? 

The cost of policing goes beyond money. For many students, the history of police use of deadly force against unarmed Black people, coupled with the presence of police in schools, creates trauma in an environment that should be safe and nurturing. When students are subject to use of force, arrest, and the full weight of the criminal legal system for breaking school rules, their experience at school is not safe. Harsh school discipline policies disproportionately impact students of color, students with disabilities, immigrant students, and LGBTQ students. In Iowa, according to U.S. Department of Education data, Black students are referred to law enforcement at 5 times the rate of white students, and students with disabilities are referred to law enforcement at 2.8 times the rate of students without disabilities.

The evidence is clear—we must reduce police presence in schools across Iowa, working towards safe schools that are police-free and provide the support students need.

• Know Your Rights: Student Rights in Iowa

• Know Your Rights: Demonstrations and Protests in Iowa

• Know Your Rights: Interacting with Law Enforcement

• ACLU of Iowa Advocacy Resource Library

• End Zero Tolerance: Combating the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• National Association of School Psychologists Research Summaries

• Police: In this document, we use the term police to refer to all types of law enforcement officials with arrest authority, including those who do and do not carry guns.

• Restorative Justice: Often talked about as an alternative to suspension, expulsion, or other punishment. Restorative justice is a way of addressing conflict and harm that enables the person who caused the harm, people who were affected by the harm, and the community to work together to create a meaningful solution that resolves the issue. There are many models of restorative justice. For more information, check out this video.

• School-to-Prison Pipeline: A disturbing national trend where youth are unnecessarily funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This can create criminal records that follow these youth around for the rest of their lives and make it more difficult to access future housing, employment, social services, and more. For more information, check out this video.

• School-to-Deportation Pipeline: When school districts overreact to youthful misbehavior and call on law enforcement to step in, it can trigger the attention of federal immigration enforcement. For immigrant students and their families, that means facing outsized threats of detention and deportation based on minor lapses. 

• SRO: Stands for school resource officer. An armed sworn law enforcement officer who is assigned on a full- or part-time basis to work in a district public school or program. It is very common for police officers who work in schools to be called school resource officers in district agreements and policy.

• Zero-tolerance: Zero-tolerance policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules and often result in schools and police in schools criminalizing students for behavior that should be handled solely inside—and by—the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to the discriminatory application of discipline and being arrested and/or pushed out of school.