Students Continue To Make Up Large Portion Of SCSU Public Safety

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- Students make up a large portion of St. Cloud State's Public Safety Department and will continue to do so despite recent program cuts. Currently, about 23 of the 30 Public Safety officers are students coming from all different departments.

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Public Safety Director Dave Schnettler says before the pandemic most of those student officers came from the Criminal Justice Program, two of the announced programs being suspended, but that is no longer the case.

"Like I alluded to earlier, the last four years we've probably had three maybe four students that came from the Criminal Justice program the rest have been made up from Psychology, Economics, Business, Information Systems, Cyber Security, that type of thing so it really hasn't been an impact on us."

He says it sort of evolved out of necessity:

"The rest of them after COVID just needed a job and we were the ones on campus that were hiring at the time. We have a four-phase field training program so you come in and you learn about this job based on our experiences and that's how they get started and keep going."

Associate Director Lisa McEwan's undergraduate degree is in History and Politics and she started out as a student officer working her way up through the department. She says it's important that everyone continues to feel safe at the school:

"We do want to make sure that our students feel supported and we are here for them, we do provide services for them, but also that anybody that comes on campus, we want to make sure that when you come to St. Cloud State you feel welcomed and when you come on campus you feel safe."

She says they have different roles for students from trainees to officers, to dispatchers, and being a student themselves helps the officers relate to what those on campus are going through on a daily basis. Schnettler says typically they need to hire 10-12 students every year and almost 100% of their student officers get a job before graduation.

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