GRAND LEDGE POLICE DEPARTMENT-- Police and Community Building Together

The Teaching Education, And Mentoring (T.E.A.M.) School Liason Program is a school-based "law-related" education program taught by specially trained law enforcement officers. T.E.A.M. is a proactive effort to make schools and communities safer, promote responsible citizenship, and encourage positive character traits.

The curriculum has been developed at elementary, middle school, and high school levels to provide students with a thorough understanding of laws and their responsibility as a citizen to obey laws. T.E.A.M. is flexible and adaptable to virtually all classroom settings. In Grand Ledge we have chosen to focus on the middle school level for maximum effectiveness, but we also provide some lessons for both elementary classes and at the alternative high school. Each lesson is approximately 30 to 40 minutes in length and can be used as a stand-alone program for assemblies or special events, or can be instructed in a consecutive sequence. Working together, the police officer, the classroom teacher, and school official decide when it is most appropriate to incorporate a T.E.A.M. lesson that will assist in classroom instruction.

In 1998, T.E.A.M. was developed by the Michigan Department of State Police, in collaboration with public and private school curriculum experts. The most widely implemented school health education curriculum Michigan Model was used as the basic foundation to create the T.E.A.M. School Liaison Program.

In Grand Ledge, the T.E.A.M. School Liaison Program's goal is to unite educators, students, and law enforcement to play an integral part in preventing crime. The philosophy is that while working together as a team we can create relationships and be united in protecing children from becoming victims of crime.

The following is an example of T.E.A.M. curriculum taken from the State Police T.E.A.M. website.

Officer Anthony Gatewood is the most frequent T.E.A.M. instructor along with Officer Mark Sleep and you may contact either of them with any questions.