MN House Approves New SRO Bill
The Minnesota House approved of a bill on Monday which State Representative Dean Urdahl says provides clarity regarding school resource officers. He says, after a change in law last year, school resource officers were being removed from schools throughout the state.
Urdahl says the change in law enacted last year lacked clarity, leaving inconsistent interpretations around the state and some districts are still without SROs today. He says this needed to be fixed so SROs could return to all the schools they previously had staffed.
Urdahl says House Republicans sounded the alarm on this issue last summer and it is concerning the majority took so long to get serious about passing a bill to fix this problem. He says when they finally got on board, they were able to approve a bipartisan solution with broad support.
The issue traces back to an omnibus education bill Democrats enacted into law in 2023, imposing new prohibitions on the use of force in schools, banning certain physical holds by an employee or agent of a district, including a school resource officer, security personnel, or police officer contracted with a district.
Language in the new measure provides updates which exclude SROs as employees or agents of a school district, excludes SROs from the prohibitions on prone restraints and physical holds; revises the “reasonable force standard” and mandates that school districts and charter schools use only trained SROs and establishes new training and model policy requirements for law enforcement.
