Spilling the tea with Deputy Tipten (DT) and Deputy Dinnen (DD). Q:Tell me a little bit about how you decided to become a police officer..

DT: I decided to be a police officer early on when I was very young. Probably middle school into high school, originally I wanted to be a wildlife officer but when i went to college i decided to change my major to criminal justice and come back home to the Sanford LakeMary area because i wanted to be into law enforcement.

DD: So i was up in college and i didn’t really have a direction in life that i wanted to go and i discovered the police academy up in Tallahassee. I had a cousin who was also in law enforcement so i kinda talked to him a little bit and decided to get into it and it’s been a great career so far.

Q:Why did you decide to work at LMHS

DT:Well i always knew that i wanted to work with kids so after about six years working road patrol i got into the Dare program as a Dare officer, but at the same time i always been coaching football and i was coaching highschool football at the time so i thought of transitioning into highschool resource officer.

Q: What’s the difference between your prior job and working as a school police officer?

DD: There’s not really much of a difference i mean we work on weekdays and we’re off on the holidays and weekends. That’s especially good if you have a family. We pretty much go through the same things, we have thefts we have batteries we have all kinds of different types of things that happen on campus just like road patrol but probably not to the excess and serious of Road Patrol.

Q: What are some specific training you do as a School Resource officer?

DT:We train year round, you have to get a certain number of hours in training every year, some training like the driving training we do every two years, the shooting of the gun range we have to do twice a year, there’s probably 20 different types of trainings we have to do in a 24 month DD:as a school resource go through active school training very often,which we’d go at like a school. Last year I think we went to Winter springs and we have like role players and different live simulations like a gun fire. It’s pretty intense how the active shooter training is conducted

DT: Another cool training is when we went to the Kennedy Space Center where they have their own police force where we had this training that was called A Live Shot House where we go into this building where the walls are made out of steel and you have to go inside and clear out rooms kinda like a school situation. You also shoot at targets at closed rooms, its a pretty cool training. You don’t normally get this type of training anywhere else but since they have that shoot house it’s a pretty big experience.