About 30 parents, students and community members voiced concerns about the use of electric shock gloves at the Omaha Public Schools board meeting Monday night while a full room listened.
Electric shock gloves have become a national conversation after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced its agents would get the technology. An NPR story reported that the gloves were already in use in Omaha after the city council approved the purchase of 40 gloves for almost $66,000 on June 3, 2025, in the board’s consent agenda.
Kathy Poehling, president of the Omaha Education Association, said the community’s primary focus should be preventing a crisis through mental health resources; expanding access to school counselors, social workers and mental health professionals; and providing trauma-informed training for teachers. Poehling called on the city and police to work with education leaders.
“Our schools need safety solutions that prevent crisis, not simply more tools to respond after a crisis has already occurred,” Poehling said. “When law enforcement equipment is going to be used on students in our schools, educators, school leaders, and the public deserve a meaningful opportunity to be part of that conversation, not learning about it from the news.”
Several students from Central High School spoke against the use of the gloves in schools. Nora Wessel, a senior at Central who was representing NEw Voices, a youth civic engagement organization, said she couldn’t imagine seeing one of her peers being shocked.
“These are adults we are supposed to be able to trust, but these weapons create a barrier for students to turn to resource officers when needed,” Wessel said.
Lux Tipton, a junior at Central, said her brother has autism and sometimes gets overstimulated at school, leading to emotional outbursts.
“What happens if a school resource officer is called to the situation, does not know how to handle this situation or simply sees it as dangerous?” Tipton said. “Yes, my brother has an IEP like other students, but what if he has some undiagnosed cardiac conditions, and these gloves are used on him or other students? That can not only make those cardiac issues worse, but that does not make him feel safe at school.”
Terri Crawford with the NAACP, Malcolm X Memorial Foundation and UNO Department of Black Studies, asked many questions about the use of the gloves, including what conduct justifies the use, who decides when the gloves can be used and what training is being provided to officers.
“My request today is if these gloves are being used in OPS, then there should be an immediate moratorium,” Crawford said. “There needs to be an independent investigation. There needs to be a public policy review. There needs to be a reaffirmation of the proper role of SROs in Omaha Public Schools.”
Daric Heard, who has kids in OPS, said officers need to learn to deescalate instead of turning to physical force.
“Let me make this plain. I have kids in this district. If they try to get away with shocking our people, just know this,” Heard said. “We will not stand by. We will protect our children, in the words of brother Malcolm, by any means necessary.”
There are 29 out of 34 school resource officers who are trained to use the gloves in OPD, and the officers are deployed to schools in the Omaha, Elkhorn, Millard and Westside districts.
Katrina Eilers, a parent with a child in Millard Public Schools who spoke during the OPS school board public comment, said in her experience as an army medic in Iraq, she saw how high electric shocks could bring a patient out of an arrhythmia and is worried how that shock could impact students like her son who have had heart problems.
“I am terrified that if OPS allows this to stand, not only will the children of OPS suffer, but MPS is next,” Eilers said.
Board members, superintendent didn’t know about gloves
Several board members reiterated concerns heard from members of the public, including the lack of the board knowing about the gloves.
Board Vice President Kimara Snipes said it bothers her how the city and the police department handled this situation with the school district.
“If OPD decided to place a new use-of-force device inside our schools, I don’t understand how that could happen without a formal conversation with the superintendent or the elected board responsible for these schools,” Snipes said. “I was livid when I found that out.”
Snipes added that the news raised a broader issue about discipline and safety. She said she wants to see more clarity on the discipline data from the district.
“Not just the number of incidents, but what kinds of incidents they are, how many individual students are involved, how many repeat incidents involving the same students?” Snipes said. “Where are we seeing the same problems over and over? What interventions are being used before a situation reaches the point where an SRO becomes involved? Are those interventions working, and are our students actually safer as a result?”
Board member Gini Magnuson said the gloves never came to the board as a vote or in a contract, but it does not absolve them of responsibility. She further pointed to a press conference with the chief of police Friday where they stated they were testing out the gloves in schools.
“I personally am sickened to learn our schools have been used as a test bed for a new law enforcement technology,” Magnuson said.
Board member Bri Full said the board shouldn’t stop at the gloves but should also take a look at other weapons being used like batons and OC spray, better known as pepper spray.
“We have to get these weapons out of our school because there’s not enough guidelines in place in our current contract that we have with OPD about the use of force and these weapons on our students,” Full said.
Board President Jane Erdenberger said school resource officers have had pepper spray, tasers and guns for a while.
“We have differences of opinion on the board as whether they should have that equipment or not, whether we should have SROs or not,” Erdenberger said. “Some of us, I will put myself in this category, when I first heard about the gloves, it seemed like an improvement over spraying a hallway with pepper spray, or potentially staff members with tasers.”
Superintendent Matthew Ray took the blame for the board members not knowing about the electric shock gloves, adding that was because he did not know about the gloves.
“As we work through this, I’ll continue to work with the board in addressing the questions and moving forward on how we address this as we reach consensus and problem solve as we move forward,” Ray said.
Police, city say gloves have been used twice in OPS
Earlier on Monday, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer and Mayor John Ewing shared more information about the two instances where the electric shock gloves, officially called G.L.O.V.E., were used in Omaha schools during the 2025-26 school year.
The first use occurred when a student from another high school was trespassing at Omaha South High School. The glove was applied to the student’s wrist for about two seconds to detain him as he attempted to flee after “fighting with a security guard.”
The second use was at the Omaha district’s Integrated Learning Program, which is a program for students with social, emotional, behavioral and learning deficits. The student had made “verbal threats and threw a chair at the school security guard,” according to police. The chair hit the guard in the head, and the student also punched the guard in the head, police said. The glove was deployed twice: once for about a second, and the second time for two to three seconds.
Bellevue Police Department Capt. John Stuck said all school resource officers from the Bellevue department are assigned a pair. Road patrol officers also check out the gloves before their shifts. There have been two instances of Bellevue officers using the gloves, neither of them involved school resource officers.