School resource officers now on high school campuses
By Joann Groff  joann@theacorn.com

New faces can be found on the campuses of Conejo Valley Unified high schools this year. With public safety in mind, the school resource officer program kicked off in September, and according to teachers and staff, the new additions are already showing their value.

"I think we're off to a very good start," said Max Beaman, director of secondary education at CVUSD. "It's a new program, so the district and the police department are figuring things out together and seeing what works best for us. The key has been the communication."

Randy Pentis, assistant police chief at the Thousand Oaks Police Department, introduced the school resource office (SRO) program at a school board meeting last summer, saying he expected it to have an immediate impact. When a bomb threat was phoned in on the first day of school this year at Newbury Park High School, it was put to the test right away.

Chad Bourget, the police department SRO on the NPHS campus, was largely credited with organizing the investigation and "putting the pieces together," said Sgt. Don Aguilar of TOPD.

Aguilar said that Bourget's commitment to the campus and the time available to do individual interviews at the school contributed to solving the case. A 15-year-old student was arrested by the end of September in connection with the incident.

"He was instrumental in finding the student and in making the arrest," said NPHS Assistant Principal Josh Edy. "He was coordinating between the detectives and himself and our site. And the day of the threat, having the police presence was helpful. The SROs at Westlake and T.O. came over immediately, too, to help with everything. They see themselves as part of the team."

And the communication between the SROs and the district has helped in difficult situations.

"What's been nice, my impression is, that the communication has gotten even better," Beaman said. "We can go through the SROs or call their direct supervisors, and we get information pretty quickly if we need it."

The district has ongoing meetings with Chief of Police Dennis Carpenter, and individual school staff meets often with its SRO.

Each SRO keeps pretty busy at their individual high school, Beaman said, but, if needed, they're available to go to middle schools.

"They've worked closely on several issues in schools and sometimes in the community," Beaman said. "It's working really well. And we want to make it one of the best programs around."

Local principals agree that it's well on its way. "He fits right in," Edy said of Bourget. "The students are very comfortable with having him here on campus. They understand he's here to help. He's not here to be a bad guy and catch kids. He's here to make our school a better, safer place."

The SRO program replaced the DARE (Drug Awareness Resistance Education) program, a police officer-lead series of classroom lessons for fifth-graders. In recent years DARE has been deemed ineffective based on studies conducted since its 1983 inception.

Pentis acknowledged its ineffectiveness when announcing the SRO program, saying that it simply does not achieve its long-term goal of stopping kids from drinking or doing drugs.

According to one teacher at Weathersfield Elementary, however, many students and teachers are unhappy with the discontinuation of DARE.

"Our school's former and current fifth-graders got so upset over the discontinuing of DARE that they wrote letters, signed petitions and even made T-shirts and posters demanding, 'Bring DARE Back!!'" said Laura Welch, fifth-grade teacher. "Their sincere pleas to the sheriff's department and City Council went unanswered. They even asked me if they could stage a 'revolution' like the patriots did in the American Revolution in order to bring back DARE."

In a letter to the Acorn, Welch insisted that DARE provides students a safe and open forum to discuss peer pressure and questions about drugs.

"Even the students know that the best way to prevent crime, violence and drug abuse is through education," Welch said. "So why in the world would we stop educating them about these things?"