Kentucky AG says public funding can be used to fund school resource officers at private schools

Republican Kentucky Attorney General Russel Coleman says it is constitutional to use public, county funding to fund the placement of school resource officers at private schools, according to a legal opinion published earlier this month. 

Republican Boone County Attorney Jordan Turner had requested the legal opinion as the county fiscal court considered a proposal earlier this year to use county funds to pay for a portion of the costs of placing school resource officers at private schools. The funds would be allocated to the county sheriff’s office, which could then cover a portion of the costs of the school resource officers. 

Christopher Thacker, general counsel for the attorney general, wrote that because private schools had to reimburse the Boone County Sheriff’s Office for the total cost of the time served by school resource officers on campus, not all private schools were utilizing the officers. 

Thacker wrote that using county funds to give to the sheriff’s office that could then use the funding to cover the “out-of-pocket costs” for placing school resource officers at private schools was allowable under the Kentucky Constitution. The reason Thacker cited: because it serves “a public purpose and any benefit to the schools is indirect”. 

“Rather, it is well established that such benefits to a non-public school may be permitted to further a valid public purpose where no direct payments are made to the private schools themselves,” Thacker wrote. “Promoting the greater presence of SROs in all schools within the county unquestionably advances that public purpose.” 

Under the current system, the Boone County Sheriff’s Office requires that private schools reimburse the sheriff’s office the entire cost of the time served by school resource officers, while public schools in Boone County, on average, have reimbursed about 40% of the costs. The fiscal court’s proposal would require public and private schools to reimburse some costs at the same rate. 

The opinion is the latest legal assertion in an ongoing debate over whether public funding should subsidize or pay for non-public schools. 

Earlier this year, the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down a 2022 law passed by the GOP-controlled Kentucky legislature allowing charter schools, arguing it did not meet the requirement in the Kentucky Constitution for lawmakers to “provide for an efficient system of common schools” across the state. Kentucky voters decisively rejected a constitutional amendment in 2024 that would have allowed lawmakers to allocate public funding for private schools. 

Boone County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Philip Ridgell told the Lantern that the county has one of the largest school resource officer programs in the entire state with 36 such officers assigned to various schools. 

“As the need and the want for SROs increases, certainly funding becomes a centerpiece of that with certain private entities, and this question came up earlier this year,” Ridgell said. “This was more of having some foresight and anticipating what could be a question in our growing community.” 

Ridgell said unlike the larger debate over the use of public funding for non-public schools, the discussion surrounding the school resource officer proposal has not been contentious in Boone County because it’s centered on “school safety and staffing.” 

“Some of our public and private schools are neighbors to one another. They’re within less than 100 yards of each other with where they’re built,” Ridgell said. “There’s a lot of those factors to consider, and that’s kind of why I believe that this one isn’t, and shouldn’t be moving forward, rooted in a whole lot of controversy.”