CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Charleston Police Department’s Junior Police and Leadership Academy kicked off Monday at Capital High School and will continue each day through Friday.
The academy consists of a week of learning different law enforcement topics presented with classroom and hands-on instruction by police officers. This is the third year for the program, and 26 new cadets and five returning team leaders are enrolled and attending.
The kids involved are middle school students from around Charleston and outlying counties. They will get to participate in obstacle courses, rappelling, first aid, crime scene investigations, team building exercises and more.
Lt. Paul Perdue of the CPD’s Public Services Unit said this is not just a police camp for kids, but it is a way for them to learn to become leaders.
“It’s not only a police academy but it’s also a leadership academy where we try instill some of the things in kids that we think they’re missing on now days as far as civics, civil duties within society, responsibility– all those things are the
things that we try to instill while they’re here for this whole week,” he said.
The program is 40 hours long, with each day starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. Perdue said this academy gives kids the chance to learn more about police officers than just what they see on television.
“What we hope to do is to develop a little bit of empathy on both parts, so the kids can see what we do on a daily basis,” he said. “Hopefully, they’ll learn and they better themselves to an extent that they go back and they’re the folks that are the leaders in their schools, as well as the fact maybe we get to recruit somebody down the line.”
Learning to work in teams is one of the main topics that is stressed throughout the week at the academy. The new attendees get put into teams and each team has a returning team leader.
“They return the next year; they’re selected to come back and they are the team leaders for the teams we have here today,” Perdue said. “The kids are put in teams the first day they come in, and they’re in those teams until they finish on Friday.”
The program is free to middle school students; however, they have to apply to be accepted, and Perdue said the application isn’t easy.
“It’s a pretty stringent application that we put out there. They have to write an autobiography. There are stipulations in there as far as their grades and their behavior in school,” he said. “The kids are selected then from those different aspects, and then once they come here they have to adhere to those things.”
The main goal of the academy is to make kids believe in themselves and become role models for other children their age.
“What we hope to do is to get kids out of their shell a little bit and do things that they don’t normally do to build some confidence in them so that they can go back to those schools and make that difference and be that positive person in that school that will change the environment for everyone else around,” Perdue said.
Story by Jordyn Johnson