Good morning! Everyone at KSB is out of the office January 25-26, 2024 for our law firm’s winter retreat. We’re really excited to be planning how to better serve our clients and support schools. BUT…just like it’s inevitable that one of your kids gets sick when your significant other is out of town, another statewide record request started coming in yesterday.
This time, the ACLU of Nebraska is requesting a host of documents related to school resource officers (SROs). The request is largely focused on the items a school must have in place under Nebraska state law: MOUs, training, policies, etc. If you’ve forgotten, in 2019 the Unicameral passed a series of statutes that require these items to be in place for schools that staff or contract for SROs. If you have an SRO (more on this in a second) and this is news to you…contact us or your school attorney. KSB has training, sample MOUs, and policies available if you need them.
Deadline. Before you respond, note on the bottom of the ACLU’s request that they have provided some additional time to respond. We believe schools would be wise to use this additional time to internally assess whether you have documents that would be responsive to this request and, then to gather and review them before sending a response to the ACLU.
What’s an SRO? Before you respond, keep in mind that not every law enforcement officer who may work with or come into your school is an “SRO.” Section 79-2702 defines SRO this way:
School resource officer means any peace officer who is assigned, as his or her primary duty, to any school district to provide law enforcement and security services to any public elementary or secondary school and does not mean a peace officer responding to a call for service, providing proactive enforcement, providing law enforcement or traffic direction for a school-related event, or providing temporary services as a school resource officer when the assigned school resource officer is not available
If a local officer drops by occasionally or even often, you may call them an SRO but they may not be an SRO as defined by law. To meet the statutory definition, they must be assigned to your school “as [their] primary duty.”
When we get done with our retreat on Friday, we’ll get to work putting together some guidance to assist our clients (and anyone who may want it) in responding. Take a breath, sit tight, and keep doing awesome things for kids. If you have questions about the ACLU’s request or about your compliance with the training, MOU, and policy obligations, please drop us a line at ksb@ksbschoollaw.com or give us a call at 402-804-8000.