Q: My son is going into middle school in the fall and I’ve heard that there are police on campus. Why? What are they there for? Does this mean that my son will be going to a rough school?

A: Having a Youth Services Officer in your son’s school doesn’t indicate that he’s going to a bad school, or to one in which there’s a high level of illegal activity. It just indicates that he’s going to a middle school or high school in Visalia. There’s a Youth Services Officer, or YSO, at each middle and high school in Visalia—and sometimes they go to the elementary schools, too, according to Sergeant Ernie Villa, who heads up the YSO program for the Visalia Police Department and acts as a liaison between the VPD and the school district.

But, when you heard about police in the school, you thought: trouble. That reaction is part of what the Youth Services Officers are there to combat.

Villa said that YSOs have been in Visalia schools for decades, though the name of the program has changed since the 1970s. From the beginning, a main focus has been to build positive, regular interaction between the kids and the police. For some kids, this is the only positive contact they’ve ever had with a police officer. The YSOs build relationships with the kids, who, in turn, see that police officers are regular people, Villa said.

This relationship often takes on a counseling or mentoring quality. If a student is in a difficult situation with a fellow student and doesn’t know how to get out of it without breaking the school rules or even breaking the law, the YSO is there to help the student come up with alternatives. YSOs help students deal with peer pressure, gangs, violence and pressure to drop out of school. If a child has witnessed a traumatic event, the YSO may talk to him about seeking some help in dealing with his feelings.

The YSOs are the go-to person for the kid who’s not been listened to before, said Villa.

A major role of the YSO, Villa said, is to keep the school campus safe so students can focus on learning and developing into adults and contributing members of society. With a YSO on campus, kids have a ready and visible reason to stay on the straight and narrow, and avoid getting drawn into fights, drugs, and other activities that detract from a learning environment.

Not that there aren’t distractions of the illegal persuasion on campus. The YSOs are on campus at the ready to respond to minor incidents and major problems. They uphold the educational codes and the penal code, Villa said. YSOs have worked with fighting kids, kids with weapons on campus, kids who sell and use drugs, kids involved in underage and inappropriate sexual activity—even sexting, when kids send sexually explicit pictures of themselves via text message.

Villa said that in middle school, especially, YSOs are on guard for gang recruitment activity. “We don’t want gangs hanging around and trying to intimidate the kids,” he said, so YSOs work to keep gangs at bay and build relationships with kids to help them resist the pressure to join a gang.

These relationships are key. And their impact reaches beyond the YSO program. These officers are also a resource to investigators who are looking into crimes that are committed off campus. Since the YSOs know nicknames, friends, and enemies, they can help to give an investigator a lead or shorten a search for a missing child.

YSOs also build relationships with parents, who are a part of the discussion when any student has gotten into trouble, especially legal trouble. If a child is habitually truant, a YSO, working with the admissions office, will try to contact the parents and let them in on a problem they may not even know about. Villa said parents can talk to the YSOs on their campus and ask any questions or express any concerns they have about things happening with their child on campus.

The Youth Services Officers that work with the middle schools are also connected in with the feeder elementary schools, responding to calls or working with Child Protective Services when suspected abuse is reported.

And beyond this the YSOs are educators on campus as well. Many teach classroom portions of driver’s education. Some cover specialty topics like the dangers of drugs.

“They’re a hybrid of patrol officer and detective, educator and counselor—a whole bunch of things rolled into one. They’re not just ‘the cop on campus.’” Sgt. Villa.

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