The students of Dana Road elementary had a lunch period that was a little more exciting than usual on Tuesday. As the students sat down to enjoy their tacos, they were joined by members of the Warren County Sheriff’s Office.

“We enjoy it, we do this throughout the school year, but it’s a positive experience for the children to interact with men and women in uniform and understand that we’re here to help them,” Sheriff Martin Pace said. “The last thing we want is for a child to be afraid of a police officer or a deputy sheriff, so this is a way to engage the children in a positive atmosphere.”

Pace said the department visits the other local schools as well, noting the local schools are very open and inviting and promote public safety. The students at Dana Road were clearly excited and had plenty of questions to pepper the officers with and were eager to talk and take photos with them.

“We sit down and we have lunch with them, we talk to them, and honestly we have way more fun than they do probably,” Pace said. “The questions that they ask are usually hilarious. By the time we leave you can tell that they’re real comfortable with us, and a lot of these children were remembering some of these same deputies from the last time we had lunch with them.”

The lunch is also a way for the department to leave the students with a few helpful tips.

“We’ll talk to them about safety, and if they ask us questions about, we’ll talk to them about wearing their seat belt,” Pace said. “So there’s an educational component to it, but I think the main goal here is for the children to have a positive interaction with law enforcement, and be able to sit down and talk to us. And we have the same thing for lunch that they’re having for lunch, and again we enjoy it,” Pace said.

Tracye Prewitt, the Special Events Coordinator for the school, set up the lunch and said it was important to her to help set up a good relationship between the community and law enforcement, and said that she had seen students who were originally afraid or apprehensive of law enforcement officers end up having positive interactions.

“So that’s what this is, building a bridge between these children and law enforcement,” Prewitt said. “A lot of them have had very negative images of police officers and negative experience with police officers in the past.

“It’s just to instill a positive view of law enforcement in these children, so that they know if they see that uniformed officer and they’re in trouble or they need help, to run to him and not from him,” Prewitt said.