Surrey Police have provided insight to how their services will look in relation to youth and the city's schools.
At the police board's regular last week on Feb. 12, Darin Sheppard from SPS shared that officers will have two systems for school-aged children in Surrey.
The first is to continue having school resource officers (SROs) stationed in school neighbourhoods, divided into five districts.
"Each secondary school will have an assigned school resource officer, and that school resource officer will also be responsible for the feeder schools, so the elementary and middle schools," Sheppard explained.
"The advantage of that is that young people, students will have consistency when they travel from one school to the next for a number of years. That provides the opportunity to build a relationship based on trust."
Often, when people see police at schools, they think that something is wrong, Sheppard said, adding that SPS wants to build a model where it becomes "a normal part of attending school."
SROs vary from school liaison officers, or SLOs, which the district has not had for many years, with the key difference being that police officers are not stationed at the schools themselves but are in neighbourhoods in case enforcement is needed.
The number of officers in each district varies depending on that area's need.
The Surrey school district employs Safe Schools Liaison workers, who are district staff members in each school. These staff provide education to students on substance use prevention, student safety and well-being and more.
SPS also employs an enhanced youth officer program for school-age children who are not attending school for various reasons.
"A lot of the vulnerable youth or high-risk youth that are in the city of Surrey aren’t actually attending school, and it's often been a demographic that we haven’t been able to reach with a more traditional school resource officer program," Sheppard said.
The unit has about 30 officers, with dedicated ones to support various needs such as gang intervention, Indigenous youth, mental health, youth exploitation and trafficking and more.
Sheppard added that there will also be a SPS youth officer at the soon-to-be Foundry location in Surrey once it's open, but a spokesperson from Foundry said there is no formal agreement on the matter yet, adding they "are still working together to determine what police presence will look like on site after the centre’s inception."
"It’s often problematic especially for kids to try and find assistance and be bounced from one place to the next, so this will provide opportunity when a youth is experiencing challenges or difficulty," Sheppard added.
