Woodland Police Department officer Roberto Cuneta’s role in Woodland schools extends beyond his work as a school resource officer.
He also serves as an assistant middle school football coach and is planning to once again coach basketball at Woodland Middle School this school year.
Cuneta said coaching has become an important part of his ability to build relationships with students and the school community.
“It's a ton of fun. It makes my job a lot more fulfilling,” Cuneta said. “And then it also really helps build a good relationship with the kids, with the school and with the community.”
Cuneta is coaching football this year and previously coached basketball. He plans to return to coaching basketball this school year, too.
The relationships developed through athletics complement Cuneta’s work as an SRO, a position he has held for a full school year and is continuing for a second year.
“It's just building those relationships,” Cuneta said regarding the importance of the SRO program.
Cuneta said he has particularly enjoyed continuing to work with students he coached in basketball last year.
“It's just a ton of fun, man, especially the kids that I got to coach basketball last year,” he said.
Cuneta's responsibilities as an SRO include serving as a law enforcement officer, educator and mentor.
“The school resource officer is obviously like the law enforcement officer on scene,” Cuneta said. “So, any kind of issues that happen in the school, like usually, it ranges from drug related stuff to maybe abuse at home or assaults.”
Cuneta added he recently responded to and investigated a serious assault at the high school.
His work also includes classroom presentations on subjects such as safe driving, drug and alcohol use, healthy relationships, age of consent and other legal topics.
“I go into health classes and I was just teaching the health class kids how to use different medical items like tourniquets and gauze,” Cuneta said.
He said he welcomes opportunities to work with teachers and students.
“Anytime a teacher asks me to come in and talk to a class, I'm always really happy to do it,” Cuneta said. “It's always fun.”
Cuneta also views his role as an opportunity to serve as a positive role model for students.
“A lot of these kids don't have good role models at home, so I try to be a good, positive role model, like the role models that I had growing up that were my sports coaches, some of my teachers,” he said.
Cuneta said building those relationships can help strengthen the relationship between students and law enforcement.
“You just try to be a good role model and you try to build a good positive relationship with these kids to not only make sure they have somebody like that in their life, but also to kind of bridge that gap and let kids know in the community that, ‘hey, the police are good people and police are there to help,’” he said.
Cuneta has also completed additional training, including school resource officer basic training in Richland and a school safety conference in Reno, Nevada. He said the training covered issues involving young people and the internet, artificial intelligence and identifying and preventing serious threats to schools.
“I'm getting trained up. I'm molding from being just a road cop into being the school cop,” Cuneta said.
Cuneta added that the continuation of his SRO position was uncertain because of budget concerns. He credited members of the community, including Councilmember Gabe Huston, with speaking up about the importance of the position.
“We weren't sure if I was going to be able to return this year, just because of budgeting,” Cuneta said.
Under the current arrangement, Cuneta said the school district will pay his overtime while the city continues to pay his salary.
Cuneta said he is grateful for the opportunity to continue working with Woodland students both as an SRO and coach.
“It's really fantastic. It's been great,” he concluded.
