The presence of a School Resource Officer in Camrose schools is paying off says the Camrose Police Service.

"We're spending a lot of time in the classroom building up confidence and what we saw was not necessarily incidents increasing but the comfort level of students, parents and teachers coming to us with their problems," said former SRO Lorne Blumhagen.

In a presentation to city council the CPS put together a graph indicating the types of incidents reported by students and the dates they occurred. From September 1997 to June 1998 the SRO reported 71 incidents - ranging from assaults to sexual offences to drugs - in schools. That number increased to 107 from September 1998 to June 1999 and from September 1999 to date already 35 incidents have been reported.

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