One of the 23 executive orders proposed by President Obama on Wednesday as part of his package of reforms to curb gun violence is generating controversy: the idea of encouraging more police officers in schools.

The White House is planning to provide incentives to schools to hire several hundred more "school resource officers". These are specially trained police officers that work in schools and are given the task of deterring crime and advancing "community policing objectives".

The White House accepts that not all schools would want to take on police officers, preferring perhaps to hire counsellors instead, but it has instructed the department of justice to give top priority this year to grant applications from police departments across the country for the school scheme. The federal government will also provide a pot of $150m to fund a new school safety programme that will pay for the police officers and reimburse schools who invest in "safety equipment".

All of that will be music to the ears of the National Rifle Association whose chairman Wayne LaPierre responded to the Newtown shooting by calling for an armed guard to be placed inside every school. But it has aroused the displeasure of the leading civil liberties group in the US, the ACLU.

The ACLU slammed the idea of extra safety equipment – which it calls "surveillance equipment" – and criticised the Obama administration for proposing more police in schools. In a seven-page letter to Vice President Joe Biden, it points out that when similar moves were taken in the wake of the Columbine high school massacre in 1999, the result was the criminalisation of naughty children who engaged in minor infractions such as drawing on desks or talking back to teachers. Research by the ACLU found that black pupils were particularly marginalised under the school policing scheme, often ending up in jail.

"Despite the president's best intentions, funding more police officers in schools will turn sanctuaries for education into armed fortresses," said Laura Murphy who heads the ACLU's legislative office in Washington.