There are now more law enforcement officers in Florida’s K-12 schools than there are nurses, and arrests of students have jumped in the two years since legislators passed a law requiring that every school deploy a police officer or armed school employee, according to a new report.

During a single school year, 2018-2019, the number of youth arrests at school increased 8 percent even though communities around the schools saw a 12 percent decline in the number of youths arrested, the report said. And police officers arrested elementary-age kids 345 times, including an arrest of a 5-year-old and five arrests of 6-year-olds in that same year.

The authors of “The Cost of School Policing: What Florida’s students have paid for a pretense of security,” said there is “little consistent evidence” that the presence of law enforcement led to a drop in the number of student behavioral incidents, indicating that school-based law enforcement officers “were not necessarily making schools safer.”

The report also found:

✔ The percentage of youth arrests happening at school hit a five-year high of 20 percent.
✔ The number of students expelled from school increased 43 percent.
✔ For the first time ever, there are more police officers working in Florida schools — 3,650 — than there are school nurses, who number 2,286.
✔ The number of police officers in schools is more than double the number of school social workers (1,414) and school psychologists (1,452).
✔ Schools reported more than four times as many incidents of using physical restraints on students.