Meet school district’s new full-time police officer

By Oliver Lazenby

Devon Cooper, the Blaine school district’s new school resource officer, is ready to get started.

Cooper, an advocate of community-oriented policing, volunteered for the position and will be working at Blaine schools starting the first week of January. It’s the first time Blaine schools have had a full-time officer; the Blaine Police Department formerly assigned an officer to campus for approximately 20 hours a week.

Both the school district and police department will oversee the role, but the officer will remain in the police department’s chain of command. The school district is funding 75 percent of the new position.

Cooper started at the Blaine Police Department a year and a half ago. He grew up on the Nooksack Reservation in Deming and previously worked for the Nooksack Tribal Police.

He wanted the position for the chance to work with kids, a desire sparked by trouble in his own childhood.

“I went through a rough patch when I was a kid so I want to help those kids,” Cooper said.

Every summer between the ages of eight and 18, Cooper went to a “grief camp” for kids dealing with loss of a loved one. At 19, he started volunteering at the camp and found he liked working with kids.

Even more incentive to work in schools: Cooper has four kids of his own and all but the youngest attend Blaine schools.

After being picked for the position, Cooper took the National Association of School Resource Officers’ basic school resource officer course this summer. The 40-hour course covers mentoring students, guest speaking and the function of law enforcement inside a school. He plans to take an advanced school resource officer course next July.

After taking the basic course, Cooper became a familiar face on campus.

“I’m over there as often as I can be, walking through the schools and getting to know everybody,” he said.

Though having a full-time school resource officer should make the police department’s crisis response faster and more efficient, the position is about much more than keeping Blaine schools safe in an emergency.

The district and police department hope the position will build relationships between police and the community and give students a chance to see police officers in a different context.

“The way I’m going to step into this is just to be another resource for the children,” Cooper said. “It’s not there to just hammer down on the law, it’s to give kids proper resources and to connect them to programs that could help them. We want to build that relationship between us and the kids and let them know that we’re always here for them.”