McCormick takes on new duties-Sheriff’s department veteran moves to high school
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McCormick has plenty of experience in the department, having been employed for six years at Warren County Jail as a corrections officer, and she now has the formal training under her belt, being only the second female from the department to graduate from the Law Enforcement Training Academy.
‘This job came open and I applied for it, went to several interviews, and they accepted me,’ McCormick said. ‘I’m still employed through the sheriff’s department, but also here.’
School resource officers are defined as uniformed, duly sworn, post-certified officers who are regularly assigned to a school setting. SROs are employed by local law enforcement agencies and act as liaisons between the police, the school and the community.
McCormick says the new job is quite a change from her previous position as a corrections officer.
‘It is a very big change,’ McCormick said. ‘I was dealing with adults there, and these are juveniles.’
Though she liked her other job and the people she worked with, McCormick says she sees the move as a real step up from corrections and worth the effort. ‘It’s better here,’ she said with a grin. ‘A whole lot better.’
Of course, she admits she has a few more people to watch out for, around 1,600 as opposed to around 200 at the jail. And does she see that as a challenge?
‘Oh, definitely,’ she said. ‘I have very good children, they’re very respectful to me and I’ve never had a minute’s trouble out of either one of them. But when I first came here I found some of the kids will try to do you kind of like the inmates, talk to you however they want to, and I was thinking, now, how do I deal with this’?
Obviously she can’t treat the students like she did the inmates, but McCormick says her fellow SRO officers, Bobby Pennington and Jarvis Johnson, have been a big help with her adjustment.
McCormick says there are a number of duties split between the three officers.
‘We patrol the halls pretty much all day,’ McCormick said. ‘We check the bathrooms. If there are any fights, we try to get to them as quickly as possible. If we find anybody where they’re not supposed to be, we check that out. We patrol the parking lot, and if there are any suspicious vehicles we stop them and check if they’re supposed to be here. We also do traffic duty, so there’s a lot to keep up with.’
McCormick says school security is always the main focus of the SROs, and all their duties are aimed at providing that, particularly with all the school shootings that have occurred in recent years.
‘We think about that a lot,’ McCormick said. ‘We talk back and forth about what we would do in those kinds of situations. We do our own scenarios on how to react to that kind of thing.’
In order to qualify for the job, McCormick had to graduate the Law Enforcement Training Academy, which was quite an experience, especially being one of the few females.
‘It has a little bit of a military feel,’ McCormick said. ‘There was discipline, military based, and the physical training is pretty vigorous. I lost 30 pounds while I was there. There is a lot of training, with firearms, and basic police training. I’m mainly proud I was able to do this at 32.’
Melanie is married to Dennis McCormick and they have two children, Trent Hampton, 14, and Nichole Hampton, 10.
Though her job is somewhat unusual, McCormick says her children take it in stride.
‘They’re OK with it,’ McCormick said. ‘My son will be here, not this school year, but the next one. I kind of ran it through them before I actually did it, because I didn’t want to be a surprise to them, but they were fine with it. They said they were proud I got the job.’