Here at Eleanor Roosevelt, every student and staff member is what makes up our school. It’s common to focus on teachers, principals, and coaches; but there is another very important group of people on campus, the security staff! Their job is much more than speeding around on golf carts and telling students to get out of hallways during lunch.
Students know them as the people who keep our campus safe, but there’s much more to it than that. Two security guards, Janet Griffen and Raquel Saucedo share their favorite parts of the job.
“The kid’s different personalities, the attitudes. It makes it exciting. Just interacting with the kids cause there’s different personalities. There’s kids that are introverts, extroverts, and sometimes I like to talk to kids that don’t like to talk, just to start making friends with them.” Saucedo shares.
Interacting with students is a huge part of being a security guard. Like teachers, they see the same kids every day, they bond with them, and help them grow into better people. As long as students are on campus, they’re here to help. But a lot of the time security gets a bad rep, or kids associate them with getting in trouble. No one likes to get called out of class when they don’t know why, but it’s not necessarily because of the security staff.
“Our job is to keep kids safe on our campus, and staff. A lot of times kids think we’re after them or doing something wrong because we have to deal with whatever they’re doing.” Griffen explains, “Kids gotta realize sometimes they’re called to an office and it’s not us it’s an assistant principal telling us, who’s our boss, to go pick them up. And we don’t even know why.”
The staff is also organized into different sections of the campus, and each guard has a different responsibility.
“Each security has a building that they’re in charge of. We call for help if we need it on walkie-talkies, we answer calls on the walkie-talkies, check restrooms, help teachers out, and we help out the staff members,” says Saucedo.
The job goes beyond so much more than simply checking restrooms or scanning IDs, there’s a much more personal side too.
“We’re not trained to be counselors, but we have to counsel kids. They need that, a lot of kids don’t get that at home,” Griffen shares. “You gotta identify who’s going through some really bad stuff and you gotta try and pull it out of them, or take them to somebody. That part of the job is really hard.”
Griffen has been working on the security staff at Roosevelt for eight years, and Saucedo has worked on campus for nine. They are only two members of a much larger security staff, and each and every one of them is important to keeping our campus safe and sound. So next time you see a security guard say hi! Make those connections!
