SOUTH HADLEY — High school students aren’t the only ones learning from South Hadley High School’s criminal justice vocational program.

During the spring semester, members of the class of 23 students will be at the Police Academy in Holyoke to act out crisis call scenarios from their personal lives — from a friend’s concerns about the mental health of another friend to a student’s experience with substance use disorder. The role-playing trains incoming officers how to better respond to crisis calls in the communities they’ll serve.

“At the Police Academy, I love when the kids will come back to me and say, ‘That’s something you taught us,” criminal justice vocational teacher Stephanie Vines said. “Or they’ll say, ‘I don’t think that person handled it very well.’ They can get pretty into the role-playing. Sometimes I actually worry that they’re going to come down emotionally, because they get into tears and everything.”

In the fall, the high school students are still getting their feet wet, learning about criminal laws and procedures. On Nov. 26, the criminal justice class walked down the street in the rain for their field trip at the South Hadley Police Station, taking a peek behind the curtain of operations from dispatch to detective work and the booking area. The tour of the station is the first of several field trips designed to demonstrate the applications of criminal justice students learn in the classroom.

“I can’t teach them (students) the hands-on stuff,” Vines said.

“Maybe they don’t want to be a beat cop, but they can see other areas of policing. We have one girl who’s not going to arrest anybody, but she’s really good at administrative things. I’ve seen the kids that say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know I could be in social work too with this,’ so they can see other things that they can do with criminal justice.”

South Hadley High School’s Criminal Justice Vocational Program is in its third year. It’s one of four vocational programs offered at the high school in which three hours of the six-hour school day are dedicated to either design, carpentry, cooking or criminal justice. Vines said her class of 23 students devotes the first hour of each day to physical fitness, then the following two hours to a hands-on lesson about the criminal justice system.

“The students understand the ‘protect and serve’ part of it — you know that they (the police officers) are here to help,” Vines said. “I really like them being included in the mental health training, because not all police calls need a police officer. They just need to assist — you know, the serving part of it.”

Both Vines and South Hadley Police Chief Jennifer Gundersen said building familiarity with courthouses and police departments allows students to explore a wide range of careers in criminal justice while simultaneously getting youth involved with community policing.

Gundersen said she tries to include the class in community events including Drug Take Back Day and having students hand out flyers listing resources for substance-use disorder recovery.

“We struggle with recruiting and policing right now,” Gundersen said. “I blame a lot of that on George Floyd protests and the impression that most of our community members got of us at that time. And I say that that is when we prove that we need better members of all of our agencies to represent us in a lawful, ethical, transparent way with our communities.”

Gundersen said she’s had an intern from the criminal justice program, and will have another intern start in January. Past intern Veronica Wall and future intern Emma Roberts said they both applied to the program to witness the principles and procedures they learn in class. During her internship, Wall focused on administrative paperwork, logging calls for service and analyzing data.

“I got to actually, like, apply the vocabulary words and different scenarios that we learned in class into this internship,” Wall said.

Roberts said the class is very hands-on, analyzing real-life scenarios and referencing actual police procedure. School Resource Officer Joshua Helems teaches students the arrest and booking process and other procedures during classes. In December, Helems and Vine will walk the students through search warrants by writing a warrant and arresting the Grinch.

“We have a vocational fair every year,” Roberts said. “In my first year, we got to research on serial killers, and then we just put it on a big poster board. And then last year, she (Vines) assigned us all roles in a court case.”

However, not all lessons revolve around policing. Students also collaborate with the Technical Training and Assistance Center, an agency that offers enhanced training on crisis call response for all police departments in Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin County. Or, students may engage in team-building exercises, even taking a field trip to the Amherst Police Department’s ropes course.

“They’ve become a family,” Vines said. I always tell them they might be bickering, but they have each others’ backs.”