Schools protest loss of deputy’s services

Sisters school officials like the job Tim Hernandez has done so much they’d like to keep him for a few more years. But unless Deschutes County Sheriff Les Stiles has a sudden change of mind, that’s not going to happen.

Hernandez, a sheriff’s deputy, is the district’s School Resource Officer. He is due to be reassigned at the end of this school year, his third in Sisters. Superintendent Ted Thonstad wrote to Stiles on March 17 saying that “…from my perspective, the reassignment could not come at a worse time.

“As of this year, Deputy Hernandez has been in the district long enough to develop the rapport and relationship with the students required for maximum effectiveness. It takes time to gain the trust of the students so that they are willing to talk to and confide in the SRO about what is happening in the community, school, and their individual lives as well as those of their friends.

“Deputy Hernandez has reached this stage and the benefits of his longevity with the district are readily apparent in his work with the students and in the impact he is having on our efforts to combat a surge of alcohol and drug use.”

A new SRO, Thonstad noted, will have to start the process all over again.

Moreover, the superintendent added: “When Deputy Hernandez was assigned to the Sisters School District, we remember requesting and receiving a commitment from you that he would be here for five years.”

A week later, Thonstad received a reply from Sheriff Stiles saying basically, “It is our policy to rotate deputies who work special assignments, such as School Resource Officer or Detective.

“This allows the deputies to broaden their experience as well as learn and improve new skills. Additionally, ‘new blood’ brings a fresh perspective and is often beneficial to the community.”

Thonstad said he was “disappointed” by the sheriff’s response. While Stiles’ letter bordered on the terse, he was quite willing to elaborate in a subsequent interview with The Nugget.

“The bottom line is real simple,” he said. “…Once we have somebody in a position for a certain period of time they start losing what we call perishable skills…Some of those perishable skills are the ability to do what their primary job is, which is patrol deputy.

“That’s why we keep the rotation time that we have unless there’s something extremely exigent that we aren’t aware of, and we haven’t run into it yet. We’re not going to extend that tour because he’s been away from his primary job now for some time.”

He continued: “Tim has all the ability to go further in this organization than what he is right now and it would be doing him a great disservice if we took him out of the loop for other job experiences, for example a detectiveassignment.”

Stiles said his office makes a practice of rotating not just School Resource Officers but detectives, members of the narcotics team, those in the forest deputy program and others.

“So we’re not just picking on Tim,” he explained. “But if you allow somebody to get sidetracked on an assignment for a prolonged period of time, all of the other opportunities, skills and experiences they can get kind of pass them by…

“The other problem is, if we make one exception, other districts will want the same privilege.” If he grants an exception for Sisters, he said, “I can promise La Pine will be on my back in the blink of an eye.”

The sheriff’s office has four School Resource Officers. They are assigned to Sisters, La Pine, High Desert Middle School in Bend and “one that floats between Terrebonne and Tumalo.”

All four will have been at their current posts for three years at the end of this school year and will bereassigned.

Where will Hernandez go?

“He’ll be a patrol deputy but I can’t predict what kind of specialized assignment he will put in for…I strongly suspect, knowing his background and where he wants to go down the road, that he’ll compete for a detective assignment, but that’s up to him.”

And what about the alleged “commitment” to keep Hernandez in Sisters for five years. Did the sheriff know anything about that?

“Absolutely not, and I was sheriff then,” he replied emphatically. “I would have never made that commitment. I have no clue where that came from…If we have somebody as a School Resource Officer for five years they’re going to be so far behind the eight ball when they come back that it’ll be a complete retraining session. We couldn’t do that.”

In any case, Stiles said, “I suspect that the next time around, knowing who we have tentatively slated right now to go into Sisters, the same thing is going to happen when it comes time for him to rotate out.”

Such protests, he said, are a sign that the person in question has been successful.