Just over a week into the school year, the Windham Police Department is having trouble keeping an officer at the Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School during arrival and dismissal.

“We are there when we can be,” said Chief Richard Selner at a Town Board meeting on Sept. 10. “The issue is to have someone there in the morning and the afternoon. If our patrol that’s working is there, it’s fine. If he gets called off and can’t be there and no one’s there, we’ve had people complaining to us that this is not happening.”

The department, which employs one full-time officer and a small roster of part-timers, posts an officer outside the K-12 school building on state Route 23 when children arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon. Selner said the detail usually takes about 20 minutes each time. 

The full-time officer covers mornings Monday through Thursday, while a part-time officer covers afternoons and all day Friday, Town Supervisor Tom Hoyt said. The district doesn’t pay for the detail.

The gaps point to a bind for a department with just one full-time officer. Any call can pull its lone patrol away from the school, and under the union contract, bringing in a part-timer to cover a 20-minute detail would cost the town at least three hours of pay each time. 

It’s a small-town version of a problem Supervisor Hoyt said is playing out nationwide, as police departments struggle to recruit. A new full-time hire is in training, but in the meantime Selner has floated having school staff cross state Route 23, while the district’s superintendent says he has seen no change in police support. 

The problem surfaced on the first day of school, Thursday, Sept. 10, Selner told the board. A person walked into the department’s office to report a felony, tying up the officer on duty and leaving the school detail uncovered. The department then heard from residents who noticed the absence, he said.

“We had a felony complaint walk into the office, found out that my guy wasn’t there,” he said. “Apparently the phone was ringing off the hook, which I apologized for.”

The Windham Police Department is based at Town Hall in Hensonville, just under three miles from the school. 

Such conflicts are infrequent, Hoyt said, but they do pull officers away. 

“You get a day where there’s a call, could be a welfare check on an elderly person, whatever it is,” Hoyt said. “But if somebody’s not down there, the general public says, ‘Where’s the cop?’” 

Windham-Ashland-Jewett Superintendent John Wiktorko, however, said the district “hasn’t seen any changes in police department support at the school.” 

“We are pleased with the ongoing professional service that the department provides our community and school,” Wiktorko said in a statement. “I am confident that the Windham PD will strive to continue supporting school and traffic safety, especially during peak traffic times during morning and afternoon bus and parent pick-up and drop-off times as they always have in the past.”

The town officer is not the only police presence at the school. The Greene County Sheriff’s Office stationed a school resource officer in the building, a position the Greene County Legislature reauthorized for the 2026-27 school year at its August meeting. 

Bringing in a part-time officer just to cover the school doesn’t make financial sense, Hoyt said, because the detail counts as a “special detail” under the department’s collective bargaining agreement. 

“Our union contract says that we have to pay our people at least three hours if they get called in for a special detail,” he said. “If you had them come in for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, it gets very expensive.” 

Selner suggested that a school employee could help students cross the street. 

“Maybe someone from the school can help us out with crossing kids across the street at the crosswalk,” he said. “Three or four buses come out in the afternoon, three or four buses come in the morning, we’re there, it takes 10, 15 minutes, and we’re done. But sometimes we cannot be there.”

With 296 students in the 2024-2025 school year, the most recent for which the National Center for Education Statistics has published data, Windham-Ashland-Jewett is the smallest of the four districts in The Overlook’s coverage area by enrollment. It spans roughly 96 square miles, covering all of Windham, parts of Ashland, Jewett, Lexington, and a small portion of Prattsville. 

By comparison, Hunter-Tannersville had 333 students over 175 square miles. Onteora, the largest district by area at 273 square miles, had 1,089 students. Saugerties had the most students 2,347, in the smallest area, 72 square miles. 

Unlike Windham-Ashland-Jewett, Onteora, which has school buildings in Boiceville and Woodstock, does not have a police detail from Olive or Woodstock police departments, Superintendent Victoria McLaren said. Instead, a school resource officer through the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office assists in arrivals and dismissals. 

Officials in the Saugerties and Hunter-Tannersville Central School Districts did not return requests for comment. 

Help may be on the way in Windham. A new full-time officer is completing training in Ulster County. Still, the department is part of a trend of declining law enforcement enrollment nationwide, Hoyt said. 

More than 70% of law enforcement agencies across the country said recruitment is more difficult than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a 2024 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police that drew responses from more than 1,000 U.S. agencies.

The survey attributes recruitment issues across police departments to both the pandemic as well as widely-publicized incidents of racial injustice and police misconduct prompting community backlash nationwide amid the Black Lives Matter movement. 

According to the survey, recruitment issues have over-burdened remaining officers, leaving them more vulnerable to burnout and, potentially, resignation. 

“It’s tough finding officers nowadays,” Hoyt said.

Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.