GREAT FALLS — School Resource Officers, or SROs, are contracted police officers for the Great Falls Public School District. They work inside the schools and provide counseling, education, and law enforcement.
Their main priority is to make sure schools are secure and to create a safe place for children to learn and feel safe, beginning on the first day of school.
Sergeant Katie Cunningham oversees the School Resource Officer Department and the detectives working at the district's high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools.
These SROs include Detective Munkres who oversees Paris Gibson Education Center and Great Falls High School, Detective Rosteck at CMR High School, Detective Kinsey at North Middle School and the surrounding middle and elementary schools, and Detective Stadell at East Middle School overseeing the surrounding elementary schools.
Sergeant Cunningham had previously been the sergeant overseeing both the SRO program and Special Victims Unit, working out of the Great Falls Police Department.
This year, the GFPD decided to designate a sergeant solely in charge of overseeing the SROs, with Sergeant Cunningham working from Great Falls High School.
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She says, “We had decided to branch those two off and to have a sergeant overseeing the SVU and then a sergeant overseeing the SROs, and so I decided to follow the school resource officers and so they put me over here at Great Falls High. So it's central, centrally located, to all the other schools, so it just made sense to have an office here just to help out as needed”.
Having School Resource Officers in schools gives the students an opportunity to interact with law enforcement on a daily basis in a non-crisis setting.
Sergeant Cunnginham explains, “It gives us the opportunity to communicate, just be with people in their everyday lives. And so that makes a huge difference, especially in these kids. And there's so many that have come back over the years and said, you know, ‘you being here or that officer being here is what made the difference for me, made me feel safe’. All these different things we hear over the years, it just makes the program worthwhile. It's just so intangible. You can't really put a price to it. You can't put a number to it”.
Branching off the previously combined Sergeant role for the Special Victims Unit and School Resource Officer teams will allow the Great Falls Police Department to provide more attention and support to each of these programs.
