How school resource officers prevent students from doing drugs
COPPELL, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – One of the suspects facing federal charges in a string of teen overdoses will have another court appearance this week.
Magaly Cano is scheduled to have a detention hearing in federal court on Friday.
Cano and Luis Navarrete are accused with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl which was disguised as fake OxyContin and Percocet, using at least eight students between the ages of 14 to 16 to distribute to other students.
Police have linked the couple to the overdoses involving nine students as young as 13. Three have died – the latest happening last week.
Here's how school resource officers are finding out how this could have happened and what school resource officers do to prevent drug use in students.
Tonard Warmsley has been an SRO for seven years now. As an SRO for Coppell High School, he knows how students use technology to conceal dangerous activity like drug use.
"It's no longer just face-to-face or just telephone, there's so many variations of communication that you can easily get lost or out of the loop so the possibility of drugs or anything else being at any location is possible," Warmsley said.
As a regional co-director for the Texas Association of School Resource Officers, he understands the importance of SROs knowing the signs of drug use in students so that they can intervene before it's too late.
"We try to keep it basic, look for things such as crowds," said Warmsley." You'd be surprised not just in a school setting but if you look at people walking out everyone's got their head down, most likely they're looking at their phone, if they're looking at their phone it must mean something's going on."
Officer Tee, as he's known to the students, says he does his best to create open lines of communication with them so he knows what's going on.
"If you look at the ratio between myself and my partner, there's two officers in a school that's almost 3,000 kids so that's 1,500 per officer," he said. "Those are not in favor of an officer, now what we can do is try to build as many bonds as possible so that hopefully that type of information that would be pertinent to understand would be coming back to us."
His message to concerned parents on how they can help keep their children safe:
"Work with us. One word that we've been focusing on with this school year is collaboration give us any and all information that you can," said Officer Warmsley. "Often times this tragedy that we're experiencing is when we would want to have a conversation, but let's have a conversation before tragedy occurs."
