Students awarded for writing mock police reports
During the second semester in Amy Schunk’s English 8 class at Abbotsford High School, students had a unique opportunity to showcase their technical, chronological, and narrative writing talents.
After reading and studying “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story about a murder, Schunk invited Offi cer Patrick Leichtnam to speak with students. He discussed police education and training, job safety, professional procedures, judicial processes and job-specific oral and written communication skills. Afterwards, students wrote police reports based on the murder in their reading. (Students’ police reports were modeled after real police forms.) A week later, after Schunk evaluated the students’ police reports, she gave Officer Leichtnam the top two from each class (with names redacted). He examined the police reports, and based on his experience as an officer, selected the best report in each class.
Officer Leichtnam returned to the classroom the following week to announce which students were the top police report writers: Antonio Cruz-Ochoa and Sophie Kulesa.
Officer Leichtnam also brought along a surprise. He presented Antonio and Sophie each with Lt. Jamison Kampmeyer challenge coins in recognition of their dutiful and professional writing skills. Lt. Jamison Kampmeyer was a detective with the Marathon County Sheriff’s Department and a Colby volunteer firefighter who died in 2012 after suffering injuries while fighting a fire at the Abbotsford movie theater.
When Schunk asked Officer Leichtnam about offering some kind of award to her students, Officer Leichtnam said he wasn’t sure at first, but then he remembered his “Jamison Coin.” He spoke to Jamison’s parents, Pat and Jack Kampmeyer, who loved the idea behind the class project and were happy to donate the coins.
Officer Leichtnam happened to graduate from Colby High School the same year as Jamison and his wife, Amy, and they were all close friends.
Leichtnam said Jamison was originally going to college for agribusiness, but the two of them used to talk about Leichtnam’s experiences as an officer in the Sheboygan Police Department.
“Some time later Jamison calls and says that he got hired by Marathon County,” Leichtnam recalls “He was proud! And he was 100 percent committed to his family and community.”
Before he moved back to the area to be the school resource officer, Leichtnam said he would always make a point to stop and see Jamison and Amy whenever he came back to his hometown for a visit.
“Police officers tend to hang out together and talk about things that most other people don’t understand,” he said. “We were friends on a deeper level because of that.”
