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The North Carolina Justice
Academy, located in Salemburg, is a state-wide, mandated academy empowered to
provide training programs for criminal justice personnel; to provide technical
assistance to criminal justice agencies to aid them in meeting their
responsibilities; and to develop, publish, and distribute educational and
training materials. We provide a wide range of courses to meet the needs of law
enforcement agencies across the state, in addition to annual in-service and
specialized courses and training.
We annually train over 17,000 students at our facilities and developed and disseminated in-service training materials that serve over 40,000 criminal justice professionals from the state of North Carolina and from 21 other states. In March 2008 we were granted CALEA Public Safety Training Academy Accreditation, and became the first accredited training academy in the state. With so many North Carolina law enforcement agencies CALEA Accredited, there is an un-spoken expectation that their training academy should be as well! I believe this distinction helps us to continue to draw students from inside and outside the state to our campuses and that having this international recognition will help us in recruiting and retaining a high-quality staff, especially in our minority recruitment efforts.
When we began the accreditation process, we felt we were a professional organization and were already performing many of the standard requirements; however, we did not have it all written in detail and incorporated in our policies. Now that we have completed the process and have the written directives and structure in place, we are much stronger as an academy in this area.
Being in compliance with particular accreditation standards has shaped many aspects of our operations, including Standard 4.6.2, where we added a program to recognize and reward employees for good performance and to formalize an ”Employee of the Year” program. Also, the standards in Chapter 7, Program Development, mean we are able to efficiently develop quick, current, and needed training because we have a structured curriculum development policy and process in place. We expect this to be a long-term influence on projects such as the new computer-based training portal we have recently launched.
The North Carolina Justice Academy is embarking on an aggressive campus construction plan to build a 20-acre mock-city training area that will be used to conduct all kinds of practical exercise training for law enforcement, fire, EMS, public health and agency heads, and the National Guard. Having our CALEA Accreditation Award will give our state legislators and the federal government the confidence in the academy to grant us the funds to build these facilities.
Ms. Peggy M. Schaefer, Director
North Carolina Justice Academy
