Mt. Spokane High Acquires County’S 1St Resource Officer

He’s handled riots, crowd control for the 1984 Olympics and 10 years of big-city crime with the Los Angeles Police Department. But Spokane County Sheriff’s Deputy Bob Sola says he’s facing his most challenging job yet.

Sola is the county’s first school resource deputy, based at Mt. Spokane High School.

He admits Mt. Spokane is “not the most dynamic school for crime. You don’t see a lot of graffiti or bad kids.”

But what makes the job challenging, he said, is building relationships with the students.

For example, Sola attended a wrestling match recently, just to cheer for the Wildcats.

“Kids were saying, `Why is he here? What’s he gonna do, arrest us?”’ he said. “I have to work on changing their perceptions.”

Sola’s purpose at the school is not to scare kids.

“I’m here as an educator, to help keep kids safe and as a type of a counselor,” he explained. “My job is not to save the day, but to add to the school safety plan already in place.”

Educators agree.

“It’s not about him being here, providing an extra set of eyes,” added principal Pete Lewis, “but about working together.”

Though he has no formal training as a counselor, Sola does have 17 years of law enforcement experience to draw from. And though he has no teaching certificate, he is already receiving requests from teachers to speak to their classes about due process, what rights kids have and what constitutes date rape.

Thinking about all his job entails, Sola said he sometimes wonders, “What have I gotten myself into?” Soon, he’ll also be spending time at Mead High School, and maybe at the district’s middle schools as well.

Since his first day Jan. 24, Sola has been sitting in on counseling sessions, trying to figure out the intricate inner-workings of the school - like who hangs out with whom - and learning the school rules. He’s trying his best to remember the names of 140 teachers and 1,300 students.

Sola is also learning new ways of doing things - like how to merge law enforcement with school law. Kids who get caught smoking, for instance, are not automatically slapped with a citation.

Sola said he’s looking forward to getting away from the traditional ways of law enforcement and focusing more on community policing and getting to the root of problems. “So often it’s just a Band-Aid solution we deal with in the field,” he said. “In here, it’s more involved. There are so many questions to answer: why the laws are there, why they’re important.”

Before coming to Mt. Spokane, Sola, 39, spent two and a half years in Deer Park helping volunteers develop the SCOPE program.

He also spent 10 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, but then started dreaming of coming to a small town where “you are the law enforcement,” he said.

And at Mt. Spokane, he definitely is the law. But that’s not all.

“He provides another opportunity for us to connect to kids,” Lewis said. “I know kids who already come to see him every day. That’s what it’s about.”