The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office recently hosted the Missouri Sheriff’s Association 48-hour Jail Academy for participants who are looking to pursue a career in law enforcement.

The training was held at the Montgomery County Ambulance District in New Florence. Six detention officers completed their training and graduated from the jail academy. They were Ben Rajchart of Montgomery County, Ashton Dyke of Van-Far High School, Monica Bourne, Zachary Kirks, Brian Hawkins and Daniel Gerloff.

“We try to host one a year here in Montgomery County because we’re centrally located,” jail administrator Eric Foree said. “Then, you’ll find that they’re hosting some at the far north corner of the state and the south corner.”

At the 48-hour jail officer academy, students learned a variety of topics such as working in corrections, health and safety, legal issues, intake, booking and release, daily operations at a jail and controlling resistive behavior.

“If the school lets a student take off to attend the course, I’ll give them the curriculum so they’ll know exactly what the student is doing so they’re not just getting a blank slip of taking off these four or five days,” Foree said. “They’ll know exactly what the student is doing.”

Rajchart is a senior at MCHS and Dyke is a junior at Van-Far. They completed several days of intense training at the academy.

“Both of them said they got a lot out of the class,” Foree said. “They said a lot of it made sense and they understood where this works, which made things a little bit easier.”

Rajchart and Dyke work as detention officers at the Montgomery County Jail.

“Most of the schools are off on Mondays, so they will come to work maybe during the daytime on Mondays,” Foree said. “Throughout the rest of the week, they work in the evenings after school from 5 p.m.-8:30 p.m. On the weekends, they might work in the afternoons like 10 a.m.-10 p.m. We don’t work them overnight obviously because we don’t want to screw their sleep patterns up.”