Negotiations underway

Negotiations are underway between the City of Lincoln and the Lincoln Public Schools concerning the funding of the ten Lincoln police officers who serve as school resource officers. These officers essentially are assigned to a beat consisting of one or more schools. Each of the six high schools has a police officer, while the ten middle schools are divided among four additional officers.

Since school resource officers were first assigned to high schools in 1994, the funding formula has varied from time to time. Originally, Lincoln Public Schools paid 2/3 of the cost of the officers' salary, benefits, and direct costs. This basic arrangement continued through the 2002-2003 school year, when LPS paid the City of Lincoln $293,512 for the nine school resource officers assigned that year. In the spring of 2003, the Superintendent of Schools at the time, Dr. Phil Schoo, notified me in writing that LPS could no longer fund it's portion of the school resource officers, due to budget difficulty. The contract had a 90 day termination clause, and he was making the deadline before the upcoming 2003-2004 school year. That year, the City elected to continue to provide SROs, in hopes that LPS would be able to once again pick up a portion of the funding when their budget picture was brighter.

Within a year the schools were once again contributing to the funding, but at a significantly reduced level. In the current year, LPS pays $30,000 each for the services of four of the ten school resource officers. The other six are paid for 100% by the City of Lincoln. Thus, LPS funding for school resource officers dropped from $293,512 for nine officers in 2002-2003, to $120,000 for ten officers in 2006-2007. The budget shoe is now on the other foot, and the current negotiations are the result of the City of Lincoln's budget shortfall. I am hopeful that we can find the funds needed to keep school resource officers on the job.

From the City of Lincoln's perspective, we would like to have more significant financial participation in this program from the school district. Of your property tax dollar, about 65% goes to the Lincoln Public Schools, whereas the City's portion is 14%. Despite the fact that LPS is the big dog on the property tax block, all of the barking is directed at the City of Lincoln. The Board of Education essentially gets a pass from the public budget critics, while the City shoulders the blame for property taxes.

For taxpayers, whether the money comes from the right pocket or the left pocket doesn't much matter: the pockets are both on your pants. The real issue is whether citizens support the need for school resource officers. I sense that the support is fairly strong, but our elected school board, city council, and Mayor would be the better judges of that. Personally, I think school resource officers in high schools are vital. In middle schools, I think police officers are valuable. My only concern with middle schools is that the need for law enforcement services is less not quite as great as in high schools, and the police resource is applied rather thinly. Spreading four officers over ten middle schools is not the optimal deployment of this scarce resource.

I think most people in Lincoln would be quite surprised to learn what the police do in high schools and middle schools. I reported earlier this year about some of the police calls at elementary schools. High schools and middle schools have greater volume. During the 2006-2007 school year, Lincoln police officers handled 1,893 incidents at middle schools and high schools between 7:30 AM and 4:00 PM on weekdays. Among these were:

174 vandalisms
8 arrest warrants
50 traffic accidents
32 trespassings
19 child abuses
38 suspicious persons
33 sex offenses
25 mental health investigations
505 larceny thefts
7 bomb threats
242 disturbances
296 assaults
9 weapons offenses

Not all of these events happened at schools--some were merely reported there--but our officers completed 1,503 incident reports for the subset of these events that actually occurred at school. To be sure, the presence of officers in the schools itself effects these data: if an officer were not assigned to the school, some of these incidents would not have been reported at all, and others would have been reported from a different location. When an officer is visible, available, and approachable, reporting is more likely. Nonetheless, our secondary schools are busy places from a police perspective. Maybe that's why LPS put another $1.5 million in their budget for security this year.

That makes perfect sense, when you think about it. We're talking about more than 32,000 students in Lincoln Public Schools. That 10,000 more than the University of Nebraska, which maintains its own police force of about 30 officers plus support staff. Each of our public high schools, if it were a city, would be larger than all but a few of the County seats in our State.