# What the SRO Funding Protection Act Actually Does

This bill requires states to maintain their current funding levels for school resource officers—the police officers or security personnel stationed in schools. Starting next year, if a state wants to receive all the federal education money it's eligible for, it must spend at least as much on school resource officer programs as it did in a recent past year. Specifically, states have to maintain funding at either the amount they spent in the most recent year they were compliant with this rule, or the average amount they spent over the past five years, whichever is higher. The goal is to prevent states from cutting back on school security personnel as a way to save money.

States will need to report annually to the federal government how much they're spending on these programs and how many school resource officers they employ. If a state fails to maintain this funding level and doesn't get an exemption, the federal government will reduce that state's overall education funding in the next year by an amount proportional to how much they cut from their school resource officer programs. So if a state reduces SRO funding by 10%, it could lose roughly 10% of its federal education dollars across all programs.

There is a safety valve built in: states facing genuine financial hardship—like a severe economic recession or natural disaster—can request a waiver from the Secretary of Education to get relief from this requirement. This means a state dealing with a budget crisis could potentially avoid the funding penalty if it can demonstrate the cuts were necessary due to extraordinary circumstances beyond their control.