ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BRENDA CONYERS
Three county officers graduated recently from the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center, according to Marion County Sheriff Lee Becker.
The three officers graduating from Marion County were:
— Bruce F. Burke, a deputy on the Peabody Police Department. Burke was formerly a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department.
— Rollin K. Schmidt, a Marion County sheriff’s deputy and police chief for Goessel.
— Jeffrey T. Soyez, Marion County sheriff’s deputy. His new partner, Jag, will be graduating from his special training, and the two will become a second K-9 unit for Marion County.
Becker said the KLETC, located south of Hutchinson, was established by the Kansas Legislature in 1968 as the central law enforcement training facility for Kansas. It is also a unit of the University of Kansas continuing education program.
Besides training the majority of municipal, county and state law enforcement officers in Kansas, the center also monitors the training records of law enforcement officers in Kansas in the Central Registry, which was created in 1982.
Information provided by the KLETC states: “No municipal, county, or state law enforcement agency pays any fees or costs in connection with the training and/or room and board furnished to their officers by KLETC during the nine weeks of mandated basic training.”
Funding for the training center is provided from the law enforcement training center fund which received $9 from the docket fee charged in criminal and traffic-related cases in state district courts.
The center also receives $2 from the docket fee charged in criminal and traffic-related cases in municipal courts. KLETC information states: “Law-abiding citizens do not participate in paying for the law enforcement training.”
The training course is a minimum of 400 hours (nine weeks) of basic law-enforcement training, and 40 hours of annual continuing education to retain their law enforcement certification.
