The Officer Doing Story Time at Union Ridge Just Got an Award for It
The Police Activities League of Southwest Washington named Ridgefield officer Kaylin Debiak its Law Enforcement Volunteer of the Quarter. If your kid has met a police drone this year, you already knew.
On July 13, the Police Activities League of Southwest Washington handed Ridgefield police officer Kaylin Debiak its Law Enforcement Volunteer of the Quarter award. If you have a kid in this school district, or you have been to basically any community event here in the last couple of years, you have probably met her. She is the one who shows up with the drone and stays to answer forty questions about it.
Debiak has been an officer for six years and has spent four of them in the Ridgefield area. She joined the Ridgefield Police Department in 2022. Since then she has quietly become the department's face for anyone under four feet tall.
What PAL actually is
The Police Activities League is a nonprofit that partners with law enforcement agencies to build positive relationships between officers and young people through educational and recreational programs. Locally that means officers going into classrooms and spending real time with students rather than showing up once a year for a photo.
It runs on donations. That is worth repeating, because people tend to assume programs like this are line items in a city budget. This one is not.
What that looks like at Union Ridge
Debiak has a class at Union Ridge Elementary. She teaches them how a police drone actually works, mechanics and all, to a group of children who are going to talk about it at dinner for a week. She also leads story time, which is not a sentence most people expect to read next to the word "officer," and that is precisely the point.
PAL has been an assignment and a volunteer commitment for her, and by her own account it has reshaped how she thinks about the job as much as it has reshaped how the kids think about police.
— Officer Kaylin Debiak
This is not her only gig
Debiak helped bring back Rocks with Cops, the rock-painting event at Overlook Park that had been dormant since the pandemic. It returned on May 30 with a strong turnout, hosted by the Ridgefield Police Department alongside the Ridgefield Art Association and Kindness 911. If you have found a painted rock on a trail this summer, that is the trail of breadcrumbs.
She also works Healthy Kids Day and local bike safety programs. At the Rocks with Cops revival she said community outreach and community policing are what she loves, and described that kind of event, memorably, as her jam. Hard to argue with the results.
The Details
Why this one is worth a post
Ridgefield is growing fast enough that "everybody knows everybody" is starting to strain a little at the edges. The people actively working against that drift are the ones worth naming out loud, and a lot of the time it is not a program or a plan. It is one person who keeps saying yes to the classroom visit.
An award from a regional nonprofit is not going to change anybody's week. But knowing the name of the officer who reads to your kid might.
Quick questions
Can PAL come to my kid's school?
Start with palofswwa.org and your school office. Program availability depends on staffing and funding, both of which vary.
Is Rocks with Cops happening again?
It came back this year after a multi-year hiatus. Watch the Ridgefield Police Department and the Ridgefield Art Association for the next one, and we will post it here when a date lands.
Is this a city program?
PAL is a nonprofit that partners with law enforcement agencies. It runs on donations, not city dollars.
More from Meanwhile in Ridgefield
If your kid came home talking about the drone, or you have a photo from a PAL visit or a Rocks with Cops table, send it my way. This town runs on people who show up, and I would rather write about them while they are still doing it than in a retirement announcement.
