Jul. 9 -- Tonight the Police Commission once again debated the venue for their monthly meetings, and once again the question was whether or not to return the meetings to the fortress-like Police Hq. building.
For many years, these meetings were held in the Police Station, behind locked doors, in the conference room. While the meetings were open to the public, the environment was somewhat intimidating. In late 1997 the Commission agreed to temporarily move their meetings to the more public-friendly Town Hall Annex, in the old High School. For six months, these meetings have been held there, but with sparse public attendance. In tonight's meeting, the question was whether to return to the Police Station, since the public was not taking advantage of the new location.
Commissioner Walker was in favor of returning to the Police Station, saying that it was more convenient for the Chief and his staff, and since the public obviously didn't care, it made sense to move back.
Commisioner Terbrusch lead the charge to stay in the new location, and spoke eloquently of the need to be accessible to the public and to make that accessibility visible. "We can't be like a ground hog that sticks our head out of our hole for a few minutes, sees our shadow, and then returns to sleep for the rest of the winter," he said. "The Police Station is the most intimidating building in town, and we have to hold our meetings where people feel comfortable participating." The debate went on for some length, with all of the Commissioners speaking. Members of the public, including George Cain, former Democratic candidate for the Police Commission, universally spoke in favor of more public access. After twenty minutes of debate, a formal motion was made and approved to extend the experiment at the Annex for another six months.
Speaking on behalf of the D.A.R.E. program for the young people of Ridgefield, a Police Department spokesman talked of the work Ridgefield police have been doing in the schools. This presentation was in response to a scathing article in The New Republic magazine which castigated the D.A.R.E. program nationwide.
The Police representative disagreed strongly with The New Republic report, and while he noted he could not speak for schools across the nation, he felt strongly that the Ridgefield D.A.R.E. program was an enormous success. The program involves 14 weeks of classes presented by uniformed officers in the public schools. Classes are taught at grades 5, 7 and 10, so in the1997-98 school year about 1075 students heard the D.A.R.E. story.
It appears to be a good story, too, and one that will not be repeated here so the details will remain a pleasant surprise to the students when they arrive in the classes. Suffice it to say that the teaching is not done totally in a classroom; that predictably boring lectures of the evils of drugs are not the main curriculum; and that students almost universally are very positive on the program. The teaching is accomplished at a very personal level, and the classes work best when "we put the lesson plan aside and simply say, 'I've got a story to tell you about a young person from this school.' That really opens their eyes!"
The State supervises the D.A.R.E. program, and the local examiner has reported that the Ridgefield D.A.R.E. program is one of the very best in the state, "a Cadillac for the other towns to emulate," according to the police representative. But many other towns cannot emulate the Ridgefield program because of controversies in the schools or lack of suport from parents and/or police volunteers. "In Stamford," it was noted, "they can't get a single office to volunteer to teach D.A.R.E. courses; in Ridgefield we have eight more volunteers than we can use right now." the overall program costs about $10,000 annually, with about 40% of those funds coming from private sources.
Chief Rotunda stated that the quality of the communication with the younger people in town was better now than it has ever been, and attributed much of this improvement to the prolonged police/student contact in the D.A.R.E. program.
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