Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Saratoga High School students (from left) Sam Lee, Eugene Chang and Justin Quon boot up the Web site they created in Barbara Reader's class for Ron Breuss, school resource officer.

Students and deputies work together to create a Web site

Plan is to make SRO more accessible

By John Pancharian

Usually the last person a high school student would approach with information policemen want is a policeman. With this in mind, a local school resource officer and students in the Saratoga High School Web design class have come together to solve the problem.

Santa Clara County sheriff's deputy and Saratoga SRO Ron Breuss approached SHS computer teacher Barbara Reader about creating an SRO Web page. "The original motivation came from the realization that a lot of people have no access to me," Breuss said.

He is responsible for covering every school in Saratoga, which makes him a busy man and sometimes hard to reach.

"In Saratoga, 90 percent of the people have Internet access, and schools have their own Web pages," Breuss said. "So the basic motivation was to increase access through this modern medium for the public."

Breuss explained that he did not have the skills to create the Web page himself. "If you asked me to design it, we'd be here for the next 42 years," he said. "So we went through the class as though it were a Web page corporation. We come in as the client and try to incorporate some real-world experience for the students."

"This page was an interesting thing for the kids to develop," Reader said. "We needed to ask Breuss questions, but he was often not available. We ended up looking at other police pages and started to get ideas from what other agencies had."

She said that usually page design is done in a more top-down fashion, but her students handled the challenge well.

Those students were junior Eugene Chang, senior Brock Goodman, sophomore Sam Lee and sophomore Justin Quon. They explained that the Web page includes biographies of area SROs, including Breuss, Ed Laveroni and Janet Shannon. It explains their duties and the areas they cover and details a sheriff's uniform. It also offers links to other law-enforcement Web sites and to Web pages created by other students in Reader's class. But perhaps most important, it has email access to the officers.

"Email is more impersonal, but it's also more anonymous," Chang said. "That makes it a lot easier to open up."

Breuss agreed. "This page is a benefit to me as an individual," he said, "because I learn about the Net environment and email. But more importantly, it's a benefit to me in my job. People are often reticent to just call or walk up to me. They may be more comfortable with email. It's also about confidentiality for the victims of crimes."

And Breuss isn't the only one learning from these students--they've also taught their teacher a thing or two. "I have kids who know a lot more than I do," Reader said. "I tell them right at the beginning of the year that's OK."

Reader has been a computer teacher for 11 years, but because the power of personal computers has doubled roughly every 18 months, little of her old knowledge is applicable now. "I think with computers you're always going to find that," she said. "At the high school level, the teacher is always learning right there with the kids."

This is the first year SHS has offered a Web design class. Reader said she had attempted to integrate Web design into other computer classes in the past, but found the challenge of covering such a broad curriculum too much for the students.

The SRO page will be online soon at www.lgsuhsd.k12.ca.us.

[ Back to Contents Page | Saratoga News Home Page | Archives ]