Sooooo….it appears I’ve been leaving out a character in my YA books. The school police officer. Call me totally uninformed, but I didn’t know that schools had real police officers in their hallways. I mean, I knew that some inner-city schools had turned to that (a long, long time ago), but yesterday I was reading the paper about a school in the south and they were talking about their shortage of trained police officers for the high school. That just sort of knocked me over. This is a small city school. It’s not the south side of Chicago. Do they really need them? Some of the students interviewed said they do. Gosh, I feel like I’ve been living under a rock or something.
This particular high school has 500 students over capacity. Yes OVER. They are supposed to have 800 students and they have 1300. They don’t have any temporary classrooms, and 15 of their teachers don’t have a permanent teaching spaces, they have to move from room to room all day like the students. They have one police officer for 1300 students. Wow. The need for even one seems like too much to me, but they’d like to have a lot more. I might seriously consider working an officer into my book next time. Have him or her do what I normally have the principal do (catch my characters skipping class!). It might be more realistic.
Are there cops in your school or your child’s school?
Call me totally uninformed, but I didn’t know that schools had real police officers in their hallways.
It’s been well over a decade for me, but we definitely had a real full-time cop at my school. His name was Officer Raider. Sometimes he trolled the inside, and other times he cruised around outside the grounds, ostensibly to catch smokers and class-skippers red handed.
I guess I’m showing my age then! I graduated in 1986. We had 1200 kids at my suburban school and nary a copy to be found. I think the real issues of the day then were pot and cigarette smoking and the administrators handled it. I don’t remember many fights.
I graduated from high school nine years ago, and we had a full time cop. We had one at my junior high school as well. Both happened to also be members of the city’s SWAT team.
And I grew up in a suburb north of Dallas in a school district with an excellent reputation.
Officer Lee was a fixture of my high school life. I saw him break up fights on more than one occasion and lead kids out to his cop car with their hands in twist ties — not handcuffs.