For Seneca High School Resource Officer Ken Sangston, there is one clear-cut responsibility that is above all others in his position.

“The No. 1 goal for me is that when a parent has a child on a bus or drops their child off here at the school at any time of the day, they know their child is safe,” Sangston said. “That goal is also only as good as the staff around you, and the staff around me here is just as strong and believes in what I do. We are all on the same page. I owe it to this community to do the best job I can do and for the community to know, ‘We’ve got this.’”

Sangston was born and raised in Streator. His father, Kenneth, was the police chief in Streator for many years, and his older brother, Kevin, is a former chief of police in Spring Valley.

“I really didn’t make a conscious decision to be a police officer, I just knew I was going to be one,” Sangston said. “Watching my dad all of those years growing up, just the importance of the job and the meaning behind what he did, it was the path I wanted to follow.”

Sangston, who is now in his 34th year in law enforcement, began his career in emergency medical services, where he trained as a paramedic before transitioning into law enforcement. He was a 26-year member of the Marseilles Police Department until 2017.

“I was a captain at Marseilles in early 2017, and I was getting toward the end of my career as a police officer. I had a couple of irons in the fire of what might be next for me. I received a text message from [then Seneca teacher, now superintendent] Dan Stecken that they were going to have an SRO the following school year,“ Sangston said.

”I kind of just brushed it off. Then, later that year, at a school board meeting, [former] superintendent Dr. Jim Carlson asked if I’d like to become the SRO, but again, I said I appreciated the offer, but I had some other things in mind. Then three months later, he asked me again and added, ‘I want you to really think about this.’ I did, and I guess I just realized this was something I really wanted to do."

He accepted the SRO position in March 2018, put his notice in at Marseilles in July, and started his new journey on Aug. 1 that same year. His dedication to student safety has led to major improvements, including updated security systems, advanced ID check-in procedures, and a proactive approach to school safety.

“I was asked when I took this position, ‘How do you foresee this in your mind? How do you foresee this going? What do you think we need to do to implement different things?’ The one thing the administration said to me was we’ll spare no expense when it comes to the safety of the kids,” Sangston said.

Sangston has lived in the Seneca area for many years and raised three children who attended Seneca schools. He was a member of the Seneca Grade School board for 16 years, including 10 as president. He has also helped coach wrestling and football, often drives school buses to student events, and makes himself available during study halls.

That presence has a real impact. Students who might otherwise view an officer as distant or hard to approach instead see him as part of their everyday lives. They talk with him, trust him and understand that if something comes up, he’s someone they can turn to. That trust is essential in his role – and it’s something he has deliberately built over the past eight years.

“School culture and relationships are big things,“ Sangston said. ”You can have all the technology in the world, hundreds of cameras throughout the school and every safety mechanism in place, but it’s about how everyone inside the school interacts with each other. Does everyone know this is a safe place? We want everyone to know the answer to that question is yes.

“We have other school districts reaching out to us to see how we handle certain things. For me, that just validates that we are on the right track and doing things the right way.

“It also validates this is where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing.”