We began by sending requests for contracts and memoranda of understanding with law enforcement agencies under the California Public Records Act to nearly 20% – 178 – school districts across the state, in urban, suburban, and rural communities.
We sent requests to 103 unified school districts, 37 high school districts, and 38 elementary school districts.
We received responses from 157 districts; we are continuing to pursue responses from the remaining 21. We asked for contracts entered into between 2018 and June 2024 and analyzed the most recent contract provided by each district, some of which extend as far as 2027.
Of the districts that responded to our requests, 68 said they had no applicable documents. Sixty-five districts had no assigned school resource officers; three had officers on campus but no contracts with cities and counties for policing services. The 89 districts with responsive documents provided contracts, including supplemental material such as memoranda of understanding, as PDFs and other document file types.
We analyzed the 118 responsive documents – many districts had agreements with multiple law enforcement agencies – and extracted a collection of data points including contract length, costs to the district, reporting requirements, and resource officers’ duties, among other topics.
Additionally, to verify and clarify notable points, we reviewed videos of school board meetings, interviewed experts on policing and government transparency, as well as school board members, school superintendents, law enforcement officers, parents and students.
The resulting data was combined with demographic and accountability information from the California Department of Education and analyzed to identify the commonalities, trends, and outliers explained in our stories.
Teacher pay data was collected from Form J-90s that school districts submit to the state with teacher pay scales. To determine the salary for a mid-career teacher, we used data from the “BA+60” field on those forms.
If you have questions, please email data journalist Daniel Willis at dwillis@edsource.org.
digging into the documents
Our collection of district contracts that informed this story can be browsed and downloaded below.