TORONTO

They've coached the school rugby team.

They've established a girl's club to bring bullies and their victims together.

They helped 16-year-old students set up their first bank account and learn how to write resumes.

They coordinated a community garden.

They deliver a series of lectures to high school students on drug abuse, drinking and driving, partying, bullying, sexting and social media.

Yet according to Black Lives Matter and their organizer /mouthpiece Desmond Cole, the Toronto Police Service School Resource Officer (SRO) program is "dangerous" and a form of police "intimidation" against marginalized and racialized "Stay tuned everyone. We are gonna raise our voices to protect this city's most vulnerable youth. Cops in schools and carding have to go," Cole said in a Tweet last month.

In fact, police services board member Ken Jeffers, who has made his living off the access and diversity public teat (he worked for the city of Toronto for more than 30 years), tried to suspend the program at the board's May meeting, without even looking into it.

That decision has been deferred until this Thursday's PSB meeting where I fear the group of spineless politically correct members who sit on the board will pander to BLM and Cole, just as those on council and Mayor John Tory did with the police ban and the Pride parade.

I guess having completely divided Toronto's LGBT community with their hijacking of Pride wasn't enough. Now There are 37 SROs serving some 75 schools throughout the year. Generally they are assigned to one particular school, sometimes for as much as four years, but help out at others when needed.

Inspector David Rydzik, who oversees the program, says he can't begin to emphasize the importance of the "relationship-building" at schools with SROs.

He says SROs act as parttime police officers, part-time teachers, part-time social workers, part-time parents, along with Big Sisters and Big Brothers.

"The enforcement piece if very very small," he said, emphasizing that they are still police officers and if something happens in the school they're there to respond.

But if something of a criminal nature does happen, he says, a lot of the time the SROs mediate - meaning they sit down with the victim, the aggressor, parents, police officers, and staff until the issue is resolved.

"Most times these officers are not making arrests in the school unless it's for a serious offence," Rydzik says.

Because they participate in so many sporting events and activities like coaching, the SROs dress about half the time in a golf shirt with the police crest and a track suit, he says.

SRO Coordinator Megan McGarry said when she was an SRO in 13 Division and was in uniform, kids would come up to her and have 10,000 questions about the uniform, her equipment and why she was in their school.

Another thing she found fascinating, she says, is that gang members would come up in the school's corridors and talk to her.

"There's no way that interaction would happen out on the streets" she said. Sgt. Mike McGhee, who oversees the two SROs in 53 Division, said their officers are there as a presence should bullying occur in their schools - often accompanied with weapons, predominantly knives.

He said they've also done programs with their schools on "distracted driving" - texting while driving in particular.

McGhee says he doesn't believe they are an "intimidating presence" in the slightest in their high schools.

If the program is cancelled, Rydzik said a lot of the "community outreach" work that has been done in what they consider "minineighbourhoods" and the wonderful trusting relationships that have developed over the years "would slowly fade away."

All of the officers I spoke with said this completely goes against the new focus on community policing in the TPS Transformational Task Force.

"I feel so passionate about this program and what it's accomplished over the past nine years," Rydzik said. "I see the difference it has made."

SLevy@postmedia.com