School Resource Officer Brandon Heide worked with middle school students in this photo from 2022.
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
When Moorhead students returned to school last Thursday, some familiar faces were nowhere to be seen. The three Moorhead Police Department officers who’d otherwise be welcoming them to the middle school, high school and elementaries were nowhere to be seen.
Clay County Sheriff Mark Empting announced the same move on Monday. For the time being, his department has suspended supplying resource officers in Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton and Ulen-Hitterdal schools.
And those friendly uniformed officers are likely to be missing for months … unless, that is, the Minnesota Departments of Education and Public Safety, the governor and representatives of law enforcement organizations are able to find a work-around in the short term to permit them to return.
“It’s all about one little word: ‘or,’” Police Chief Shannon Monroe said last week. He was announcing the decision that his department and Moorhead schools had made right after Attorney General Keith Ellison issued an opinion clarifying those changes. They sharply limit any use of force toward pupils, outside of “situations where it is necessary to prevent bodily harm or death.”
The original state statute as passed several years ago, applied specifically to using physical force on students with disabilities. Authors in the Department of Education amended it this year to apply to all students. The previous wording permitted the use of reasonable force to “restrain a student OR to prevent bodily harm or death to another.” By deleting the word “or,” Monroe and Empting agree, they substantially changed the SRO’s options by permitting restraint only in cases of imminent “bodily harm or death.”
“We’re fine with the rest of the statute as amended,” Monroe explained, pointing to prohibitions on “proning” students and using compressive restraint on the head, neck, and across most of the torso. But, he says, the prohibition of any kind of physical force “except in cases of bodily harm or death” severely limits the SRO’s options in the less drastic circumstances that make up the vast majority of cases in which officers are expected to intervene.
“Ninety percent of the incidents our SROs handle involve less drastic situations,” he said, “for example, trespassing, disruptive behavior, criminal damage to property or even handing out beer or drugs. If the student doesn’t respond to a verbal warning, the officer’s hands are tied.
“As it stands, the SRO would have to stand back and call in a patrol officer off the street.” (Other officers’ actions are not affected by the education statute.) That means having to wait 10 or 20 minutes until a patrol car can reach to the school, he says. But that’s not all: “Our resource officers are seasoned veterans who are probably more familiar with dealing with students than the patrol officer, who may be fairly new on the force. Yet the more experienced officers now are not empowered to handle it on the spot. It’s strictly hands-off.”
State Sen. Rob Kupec, who represents District 4, thinks the change in wording – tiny in size, but massive in impact – may have been an oversight by the Department of Education staff who crafted the amendment. “It’s such a small change. That’s how it got missed,” he suggested. He noted that it flew under the radar when the omnibus education bill was publicly debated, both in committee and on the floor. “The law enforcement groups’ focus wasn’t on this, probably because it was understood to be an education bill,” he said.
The issue heated up among law enforcement agencies in mid-August, when POST, the State Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, raised the issue in its newsletter. School districts and law enforcement agencies have been debating the murkey issue ever since.
Moorhead is one of the two school districts immediately affected by the change. That’s because the school year was launched 10 days early this year; the variation on the normal post-Labor Day schedule was necessitated by the high school’s upcoming move to its new facility at the end of the year. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Department has also pulled its officers from Andover High School and Oak View Middle School. Other districts that contract with local police for SROs were looking at their options this week as they readied for classes Sept. 5.
Meanwhile, St. Paul has been buzzing with conversations seeking ways to correct the situation. Hopes are high that a middle path can be carved out, short of calling a special legislative session.
“As it stands, now a teacher can’t even grab a disruptive kid by the arm to take him to the principal’s office,” Kupec said, noting that the main group affected by the restrictive language is all other school employees, from bus drivers and teachers on up to school administration.
“I don’t think anybody thought so small a change in wording would have these far-reaching consequences,” he contended. “This certainly was never the intent. I think it was an honest mistake.”
