Iowa School Officers Refer and Arrest Black Students and Students with Disabilities at Disproportionate Rates

A statewide review of school policing records in Iowa found that Black students and Students with Disabilities are handed over to law enforcement inside their own school buildings at rates far above their share of enrollment. The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa (ACLU of Iowa) built its report, Rethinking School Safety in Iowa: The Harms of School Resource Officers, from public records, federal civil rights data, and earlier studies, tracing at least 130 full time School Resource Officers (SROs) working across 78 districts that together enroll more than half the students in the state. These are sworn police, stationed in schools, carrying the authority to investigate, charge, and arrest the children in front of them. Black students hold seven percent of Iowa's public school seats yet account for thirteen percent of referrals to law enforcement and twenty one percent of arrests. Students with Disabilities hold thirteen percent of those seats and account for twenty seven percent of referrals and twenty six percent of arrests, a rate of 2.3 times that of students without disabilities. Students who carry both forms of exclusion in the same moment stand inside both of those figures at once.

Pulled apart district by district, the racial gap grows severe enough that no explanation rooted in student behavior survives contact with the numbers. Waterloo enrolled a student body that was twenty seven percent Black, and those students absorbed seventy one percent of all referrals and sixty nine percent of all arrests. Cedar Rapids enrolled nineteen percent Black students, who accounted for twenty nine percent of referrals and forty six percent of arrests. Waukee produced the sharpest contrast of all, with Black students at six percent of enrollment generating fifteen percent of referrals and forty percent of arrests. Statewide, Black students were referred at twice the rate of their peers and arrested at 3.7 times that rate. The report set these figures beside national studies establishing that Black students neither misbehave nor commit offenses in schools at higher rates than anyone else. What remains is a pattern of students identified and disciplined far above their share of enrollment for reasons that have nothing to do with what those students did.

The report also documents what these officers are actually being called in for, and the answer is not serious harm. Vaping topped the list. Records showed officers stepping into moments where students pushed one another, passed along a rumor, or struck a teacher as disrespectful in class, the ordinary friction that teachers and other school staff have always settled themselves. Each time a sworn officer enters one of those moments, a routine matter of school discipline can turn into a referral, a citation, or an arrest. When a student or a family believes an officer got it wrong, the report found nowhere for them to go: not one of the 78 districts maintained a complaint process specific to SROs, 38 had no complaint process whatsoever, another 38 pointed to general school policies that frequently do not cover officers because those officers work for the police rather than the district, and two simply forwarded families to the agency employing the officer. This is the condition in which an officer's snap judgment outweighs a student's own account, and nothing in the structure exists to correct it.

When we hand a hard job to someone we never prepared, the people already pushed to the edge pay for it. The ACLU of Iowa asked districts to end SRO programs outright, pointing to Des Moines and Ames, which have already removed officers from their schools, and where districts keep these programs, the organization called for stricter training, honest reporting, measurable goals, clear limits on when an officer should step in, and training that covers calming tense situations, bias prevention, students' civil rights, adolescent development, mental health, and disability sensitivity. It also asked schools to settle internally what they can settle internally. The reason that request lands so hard is what the report found underneath it: 27 of the 78 districts had no policy requiring SRO training at all, 32 handed the question to local police, and of the 62 police agencies that answered, 26 had no training policy either. We recognize this shape. We are the ones responsible for removing the practices our own institutions keep running on assumption rather than preparation, and Iowa shows us exactly what assumption costs. Our own gatherings run on the same quiet arrangement: someone will handle it if something goes sideways, and we have never once said who, or what we taught them.

A prepared welcome costs us an afternoon. An unprepared one costs somebody else their place among us.

Read the Full Article: Black And Disabled Students Are Arrested At Higher Rates By Iowa School Resource Officers: Report.
By: Jahaura Michelle