The Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training is celebrating a big milestone, after graduating 21 law enforcement officers from the first basic training class conducted in western Kentucky.
According to a news release, several of those new officers are locals, including Hayden LeGrand with the Elkton Police Department, Skylerr Armstrong and Mark Kurtz, both with the Hopkins County Sheriff’s Department, Ethan Wells heading to the Greenville Police Department and Aaron Revelett with the Princeton Police Department.
For many years, officers from every county in the commonwealth have traveled to Richmond to receive basic training. For the first time since training became mandatory in 1998, Kentucky is simultaneously offering training in two locations after the fairly recent opening of the Training Facility in Madisonville.
The Richmond campus graduates an average of 10 basic training classes each year, resulting in approximately 300 new officers ready to serve communities across Kentucky annually. With the addition of the Western Kentucky facility, two more classes will graduate each year.
These graduates completed the state-mandated 20 weeks of basic training, which included more than 800 hours of instruction in major training areas.