Page 437 - NIXBOOK

In fact I wound up in a few yearbooks:

After five years of SRO duty, I’d had enough. It was tough dealing with the screwed up kids but I also had to deal with a lot of
their screwed up parents who wanted to complain to the principal, to the superintendent, and to the police chief about that
officer in the school who kept arresting their little boy and it was all my fault that their boy had a conviction record. I’d love to
say that’s an exaggeration but sadly it was true. Some parents blamed me for their kids’ arrest records. But in the end it wasn’t
the crazy kids or the crazy parents that wore me out, it was the crazy school administrators. The high school principal and
assistant principals (yes there were two of them) especially weren’t always appreciative of my suggestions about school safety
and security issues and eventually I got tired of being frustrated too often, especially when they gave too much leniency to kids
who deserved more punishment. When I stopped being the SRO another officer took over. He wanted it because his son was
going to the school there and he wanted to keep an eye on him, and after that the funding ended when the economy tanked so
that was the end of official SRO’s for the Poulsbo schools for a few years. Eventually the program came back but I was still not
interested; I had determined that I liked being a patrol officer more than a school cop. Like I said, I had done my time in the
trenches.
For the rest of my police career I still regularly made visits to the high school and junior high and sometimes even the elementary
schools and I stayed on a first name basis with all of the principals and administrators and a lot of staff.

On a side note, one of the great things about Poulsbo being a small town was that virtually all of the troublemaking teenagers
who were out of school – either graduated, dropped out, or expelled – usually didn’t stick around for too long. Sooner or later
they all realized that not only was Poulsbo was too small for them to avoid the police for too long, but it was just too small all
around. So they’d all leave for bigger cities. It was really nice to see those problem children grow up and disappear and become
somebody else’s problem.

Several high school principals later, things improved considerably at the school when a young new principal was hired, this was
around 2014. Because he was young (in his 30’s!) he had a lot to prove and so he worked hard to clean up the school, which
looked a lot like expelling the troublemaking kids instead of keeping them all to boost the attendance numbers and get more
federal funding. Getting rid of the slackers and drug addicts made a huge difference; within just a few months they even stopped
hanging around the high school lurking in the woods waiting for their friends to come out between classes. I think because most
of the friends were also kicked out. Taking school courses online was becoming popular and more easy, so it was not like the
bad kids were being completely thrown away in to the wilderness; they all had the opportunity to continue their learning at
home. While that principal reigned, the total number of trouble
making kids in the whole school at any given time – and I mean the
worst of the worst kids – usually numbered around 3. Or about 15
times less than what I had used to deal with.

That simple act of cleaning house made a significant positive
difference. That, and the ever-increasing price of cigarettes. Once a
pack of smokes cost climbed to around 8 bucks I saw a massive
decrease in the numbers of kids I was catching smoking near the high
school; like across the street in the woods or down the street in the other woods or on the sidewalks a block away. In fact the
number of kids I even saw smoking near the school went from dozens a year to virtually zero. It was a beautiful thing.

Then the economic consequences of the Great Recession killed the SRO program for good; neither the PD or the School District
could afford to put an officer in the school anymore. But the new principal had done such a good job, they didn’t really need an
SRO anymore. Of course the school principals still called 911 from time to time to have us chase down or haul the occasional
miscreant away but for the most part, the schools in Poulsbo improved in quality considerably. When the economy recovered,
SRO positions started getting reinstated again.