Student safety is their job. The Brownsburg Community School Corporation’s School Resource Officers (SROs) are Law Enforcement liaisons charged with protecting students, staff and facilities from the moment students leave their house in the morning, until they return home after school.
There are 167 teachers, 3,177 students and numerous support staff that constantly move in and around BHS, making security a daunting challenge. To help mitigate this task, security precautions are integrated into the daily routines of all the students and staff members.
The bigger the school, the more staff members the school needs. Due to the size of BHS, there are more safety issues and more tracks to follow if there is an issue. “The bigger the school, the more students that you have, the more people that you have, I think the greater need for even tighter security,” Principal Tom Balitewicz said. “So, I’d say that is probably the biggest challenge.”
The canine dog Kaya goes around the school sniffing lockers and backpack making sure the students are safe. They smell for drugs, bombs and other things that can hurt the student body.
“I am the canine officer at the high school. [Kaya] walks around with me and helps me conduct searches,” office Shelby James said. James walks around with her canine around the school helping the students get to class or helping them cope in daily high school life.
The resource officers’ job is to encourage a strong connection with the students and to protect school assets. Students can find them near the bulldog staircase upstairs in their office, wandering the cafeteria during lunch interacting with students and in the hall during passing periods. Junior Carter Gatton remarked that the relationship between the student body and the SROs is “Pretty good because the resource officers tend to care about what students are doing outside of school and their hobbies.”
Students will also see the SROs out in the community, assisting buses with traffic and monitoring student parking lots and bus stops.
But it doesn’t just fall to the adult population at the school to be security sensors. Everyone is responsible for being vigilant in the protection of the school and for personal protection of adults and students.
Students have many resources available to get help for personal needs,a friend in crisis or to report a plethora of concerns (safety/bullying/theft/mental health/substance abuse). A new option that was recently adopted is the STOPit mobile app.
“To report something, STOPit is an anonymous reporting system that you can use… and that includes bullying, but they could also report other things that they’re concerned about on that app and that goes to [the] Corporation, and we’re able to respond to those fairly quickly,” Balitewicz said.
Fostering a good relationship between SROs and students means when a student needs help on the worst day of their student career, there is a uniformed professional there.
