West Cook News

The Berwyn City Council recently approved a request from Morton West High School to hire an additional school resource officer.

During the April 11 Berwyn Committee of the Whole and City Council meeting, officials considered several organizational changes for the police and fire departments. The biggest request came from Morton West High School for an additional school resource officer (SRO). The school already has an existing agreement with the Berwyn Police department for two SROs. Superintendent Timothy Truesdale explained that the main motivator behind the request was the sheer size of the school and student body. The school has more than 4,000 people coming in and out each day, and recently added 100,000 square feet.

"In some of the documentation that I provided, I think that one of the things that we've seen a huge increase in this year is the number of presentations that (the SROs) have made with teachers and students that have outreached to them," Morton West High School Principal Kristy Cavanaugh said. "So that may look like a certain topic for a certain course, the teachers, ask the resource officers to come and speak to that. They sometimes send students to them for different interviews. They participated in different videos and ... public service announcements."

Cavanaugh stressed the importance of officers making a connection with the students.

"So really (they're) establishing that connection where they're able to individually get to know both of the school resource officers instead of just see them as somebody else that's around the campus," she said. "So I think it was like 152 classroom visits this year alone, coupled with the home visits, that they work very closely with our student support teams on, we can consider them to be part of the student support team and our student support teams, our social workers, our counselors, our dean's office, and they go out and they visit, we're at 429 this year."

SROs do more than just monitor the physical safety of students inside the building during the school day. They frequently make home visits to address issues with home life, student behavior, student attendance, or just to check on community members. They also foster relationships with the students to decrease any rifts between the community and law enforcement officials. With recent shootings and events across the county, the school sees the good work that SROs have done and want to add another officer. School officials shared the improvements in attendance alone, with truancy rates decreasing 65% and extreme truancy by 16% just within the current school year. 

After the discussion, the council approved the request.

The council also approved a request from the police department to hire a probationary officer from a different eligibility pool to bump up its roster numbers. Council also approved the purchase of a new Pierce Enforcer pumper engine for the fire department, for a maximum price of $768,000, as well as a new records management system image trend for the fire department systems. This request will be funded with $125,000 from the city’s ARPA funds.