Sauk Valley Community College‘s police academy, now hosting its 10th class, is not only resolving the issue of lengthy recruitment timelines, local police chiefs say, but new officers say they can build stronger ties with the communities they will serve.

The academy opened in August 2022 as the eighth in Illinois and the first in the northern part of the state. To date, 274 recruits have graduated, going on to serve at Sauk Valley-area law enforcement agencies along with many others in the region.

Currently, 35 recruits are in training, SVCC Police Academy Director Jason LaMendola told Shaw Local.

“It’s been a huge blessing to our department in a lot of ways, and I think our community overall,” Dixon Police Chief Ryan Bivins told Shaw Local.

Rock Falls Police Chief Ryan McKanna also said it’s been beneficial.

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Sauk Valley Police Academy instructor Mike Wolfley watches the training Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. Cadets are learning to handle a chaotic scene with multiple people involved. (Alex T. Paschal)

To become a police officer, individuals must first be hired by a city or county department and are then sent to an academy for training. Before the academy at SVCC opened, there were four academies that Sauk Valley-area departments sent their recruits to attend in eastern and southern Illinois, LaMendola said.

Since the academy at Sauk opened, Bivins said, the department sent five recruits through the program who are now officers with the Dixon Police Department, with two new hires currently enrolled.

McKanna said the RFPD has sent about six new hires through the academy and has one new hire currently enrolled.

Before Sauk’s academy opened, recruits attending the academies in southern and eastern Illinois grappled with long drive times and being disconnected from the departments they’d been hired by. On the flip side, department members were also disconnected from their soon-to-be coworkers, and training new officers took longer because the academies often had long wait lists for enrollment, LaMendola said.

Those were issues that officials advocating for and eventually building the academy at Sauk hoped they could solve.

McKanna said the Rock Falls department has “been able to get somebody in, thankfully, fairly quickly” because the academy typically reserves “one or two spots for us.”

“It’s been nice to keep everyone here locally,” McKanna said, explaining that the department can still interact with its recruits as they go through the academy since they’re not hours away across the state.

Bivins also said that staying local is a major benefit, especially since new hires are able to participate in the department’s community events, such as Shop with a Cop, while going through the academy.

With the academy at Sauk “they definitely get exposed more to that” because “they’re around to participate in those events throughout the week or in the evenings or weekends,” Bivins said.

It “allows for the development of relationships early on,” said Dixon Police Officer Christian Yepsen, who graduated from the academy in December.

As an example, Yepsen said, during his time in the academy, he formed connections not only with Dixon police but also with officers from other areas such as the Rock Falls and Sterling police departments.

Bivins said another bonus has been how the department and the academy work together by sharing facilities, such as the shooting range, and some Dixon officers are instructors at the academy.

“That partnership of helping each other out, it’s been pretty neat to have,” Bivins said, adding that he believes it better trains new officers.

Yepsen said many area agencies besides the Dixon police are also involved with the academy, along with those in other roles of the justice system, such as judges and state’s attorneys.

“That allows us to not only learn from them, but kind of get familiar with who they are...instead of coming straight out of the academy and I don’t know any of the surrounding agencies or who works there,” Yepsen said.

With area agencies so involved in training, “it allows the departments to kind of put in their personal touches of what the community needs from their agency, and I think that that helps you once you get out onto the road, knowing what your community needs, what your community wants, how to work with your community,” Yepsen said.