Every morning at Brown County High School, students and parents are greeted with a smile as new school resource officer Greg Duke opens the door for them.
“I try to greet everybody and try to put the faces and names together when I can, who their friends are. But I’ve been at it for several weeks and I’ve got a long way to go,” he said.
Duke is a new deputy with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department, but he is nowhere near new to law enforcement.
He retired from the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department after more than 20 years of service. He was serving as supervisor for the department’s day shift. “I had no thought of retiring and not working,” he said, citing his good health.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]He also served as captain of detectives for 10 years. He attended police training overseas and attended the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Academy.
He and Sheriff Scott Southerland have worked for at least two decades as detectives together.
Duke will work as a merit deputy for the Brown County Sheriff’s Department when the schools are not in session, which brings a smile to Southerland’s face.
“I’ve always had a lot of respect for him. He probably doesn’t know it, but when I was young — I was not a whole lot younger than him — but I kind of looked up to him as a role model,” he said.
“My vision for a school resource officer is somebody that is bright enough to interact on a level plane with the staff. I think we’ve got that and then some. I especially like the idea of having him around here when he’s not on the school because his training, his experience and what he knows, that’s just a whole new dimension to our department.”
The school resource officer job opened when Deputy Michael Rogers left to become a conservation officer with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Southerland approached Duke about filling the spot. Duke was introduced as the new SRO at the Sept. 5 Brown County Schools Board of Trustees meeting.
The district received $80,000 in secured school safety grant funding to pay for the SRO.
Southerland and Duke had talked about him coming to Brown County to work as an officer. This time, when Southerland called, he offered a job Duke did not know much about.
Prior to retiring in Bartholomew County, Duke had deputies on his shift who were serving as SROs. He said he spoke with those SROs and found that they loved their jobs.
He recently returned from a weeklong SRO training, which had officers from all over the country. One of the biggest takeaways Duke had from that training was about child psychology and brain development in infants to adolescents — “cautioning you not to expect too much out of even the brightest students who might be well developed in the frontal lobe, but still largely leaning on the feeling part of their brain. That was important right off the bat,” he said.
The training also covered case law regarding SROs.
“To some extent, an SRO is a part of the staff — not part of the administration, but part of the school staff. They ask for and get the help they want from me, but at the same time, I’m only completely responsible for the sheriff, first, last and always,” Duke said.
“If you’re going to be there, you want to be flexible — anything from directing traffic to mentoring or interacting with the kids.”
Patrolling halls
Building relationships with students and staff is an important part of Duke’s job.
“It’s to be helpful, to be a mentor, to understand their perspectives, but not behave like them — very much like a teacher. If you can get the respect that a teacher gets here in Brown County, you’ve accomplished something, because they get respect here,” Duke said.
That’s something Brown County High School Principal Matt Stark told Duke he would need to do to become successful.
“In the short time he’s been with us, he’s working hard to build relationships with kids and talk to kids, kind of break down (a barrier). Sometimes people have a barrier between themselves and law enforcement. I think he’s doing a great job,” Stark said.
As an officer in Bartholomew County, Duke was in and out of schools working on child abuse, neglect or molestation cases, which meant he had some idea on how schools work.
Since he has that experience, Duke said that’s something he’ll always be on the lookout for when he is in the schools.
Duke has an office at the high school and is primarily there, but he makes an effort be in all the schools often, including the Career Resource Center of Brown County. Administrators and staff have his cellphone number. He is notified when there’s an immediate safety issue.
If he’s not there, another officer is checking in. Reserve Deputy Andrea Baker is a former teacher and she can be found primarily walking the halls of the elementary schools and even helping students with their assignments.
So far, he’s found that kids like to talk to him, Duke said. “But you have to be careful they are not just fixing their friends up — or maybe not so much a friend — with trouble,” he said.
Social media is often where fights happen nowadays with older students — not so much in the halls — and that leads to the breakdown of relationships, Duke said.
Bullying is also something Duke watches for, because it’s not something that will likely be reported directly. “It’s going to come second- or third-hand, or you will see something that suggests it. That’s why you want to see them in a variety of circumstances, not only who they are with, but how they act around other people,” he said.
Vaping is one of the main issues Duke deals with at the high school.
“It’s a nuisance. No one is lurking around in bathrooms or hallways trying to catch someone vaping, but they still get caught because they’re not very good at trying to hide it,” he said.
“Vaping is far and way more popular (than chewing tobacco and cigarettes).”
Duke also handles truancy at the high school and junior high.
“It’s an occasional one where somebody angry, usually not at the school, but some other drama in their life, they run off. High school is less of a problem, but it is at the junior high,” he said.
“I might spend a couple of hours wandering around until I find them at the magic shop or something, then say, ‘Back to school.’ If they’ve got any money, then they’re having some ice cream. I let them finish that, then I say, ‘Back to school.’”
Great asset
A school resource officer’s job is based on three principles: Being a mentor or unofficial counselor; being an unofficial educator or lecturer; and acting as law enforcement.
“My success will be measured over time — not in a few weeks, but a couple of semesters,” he said.
He said he hopes his presence in the schools — smiling, waving, helping change tires and opening doors — will give the students a positive example of police work.
“It’s the small acts of kindness and politeness. Pretty soon, hopefully, they start to look at you as part of the furniture,” he said with a laugh.
“(Then) there’s less stigma attached to having contact with the police. … People know where to find me. When they come in the morning, I’m on the front steps. When they leave, the principal and I are out on the front steps. At lunch, they’ll see me. It’s not hard to find me and get me alone if you want to. They know how to do that.”
There have been times when Duke has had to go out to students’ homes for follow-up investigations on issues like truancy or behavior problems. This allows him the opportunity to gain the trust of students.
“If they talk to their friends about it, and their friends don’t know that I’ve been to their house or that I’ve spoken to them someplace else, it’s like, ‘He really didn’t tell anybody.’ That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. Would you want someone to repeat something you’ve told them in confidence?” Duke said.
But don’t assume that Duke’s presence is a pipeline to the criminal justice system.
“That’s not the idea at all. … We want school to remain school. We want school matters to remain school matters, not become police matters. … If they’re going to vape and stuff like that, obviously they get themselves caught, so they’re going to get a ticket for that. But guess what? They’re in high school. They could get a ticket for their driving behavior,” he said.
Stark said Duke’s experience is “invaluable” when knowing how to react appropriately to a situation with a student, “knowing when something needs to be tougher and knowing when something needs to be a conversation,” he said.
“I am very thrilled to have him on our staff,” Stark said. “… I’m just so impressed by his humility. Even with all of this experience and knowledge, he’s still very humble, very approachable type of individual. I think he’s a great asset to not only our school system, but our community as well.”
