Roseville school board meeting includes police presentation

ROSEVILLE — The Roseville Police Department and Roseville Community Schools are working together in an effort to keep students as safe as they can.

At the Oct. 16 Roseville Community Schools Board of Education meeting, Roseville Police Chief Mitch Berlin gave a presentation on how the department is providing a police presence in the district.

One way of achieving that is through the work of the district’s two resource officers. Officer Ed Kleinedler serves Roseville High School, and officer Kurt Latour serves Eastland Middle School and Roseville Middle School. A school resource officer is a police officer assigned to work at a school in collaboration with the Police Department. School resource officers serve as mentors, too.

“They’re very active in the schools,” Berlin said. “We believe in a proactive response.”

He added that the SROs work an eight-hour day, plus one hour of overtime to address any after-school issues that might arise.

“If there’s an issue at a middle school or elementary school, they respond to it,” said Berlin, adding that the department funds the overtime.

He shared information about how the department handles any potential school threats.

“Every threat report, or rumors that come into the Police Department, is diligently investigated. The board knows and the administration knows that throughout the night we’ll be out there until 3, 4, 5 in the morning until we get it done and provide safety,” Berlin said. “If we don’t have the investigation concluded by the start of school, you’ll see the influx of police cars at the school that morning to provide a safe environment until we get it investigated.”

During the meeting, Berlin also touched on the incident in which a Roseville Middle School student was severely injured when walking to school in April 2022.

“As you know, we had a tragedy at Barkman (Street) and Martin (Road) last year. Since that day, we’ve assigned an officer every morning — not just for traffic control, but also for school security,” Berlin said. “Our resource officer doesn’t get on duty until 7:15. We have an officer out there prior to that at 7-7:15 every morning to provide lights for the intersection.”

The Police Department also worked with DTE and the Roseville Public Works Department to install new lights at the intersection, as well as in front of Roseville Middle School.

“If you noticed also down Normal (Street), in front of the high school, we put up lights to increase safety measures for the traffic as well as the security of the school, staff and the students,” Berlin said. “Occasionally we have traffic issues we have to address. Occasionally, we do have to take enforcement action if we can’t get compliance.”

Roseville Community Schools Superintendent Mark Blaszkowski commented during the presentation.

“One other huge benefit by having the police in our buildings is they know our buildings,” Blaszkowski said. “They know where to go if there’s an emergency, whether it’s something in the athletic complex, they’ll know where things are. Or if it’s something in another building, they know where they’re at. Anytime that there (was) a terrible situation, that would reduce response time.”

At the end of the presentation, Berlin said officers recently did an advanced active shooter training session in Oakland County in a former elementary school that is now a training facility.