As summer comes to a close and children have returned to school, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Zanesville Police Department closed the curtain on another successful summer of mentorship between law enforcement and the community’s youth.

For the past eight years, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Zanesville has dedicated time to Badges for Baseball, a program that connects young children with local law enforcement.

Originally partnering with the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office, Big Brothers Big Sisters began partnering with the Zanesville Police Department about five or six years ago.

Since that time, one officer, who is now a detective, has remained constant throughout the duration of the partnership.

Two times per week throughout June and July, Detective Chris Andrews with the Zanesville Police Department visits local summer day camps hosted at Eastside Community Ministry, Maysville and the Civic League to provide a lesson to the children and then play some games.

“He just gives a lesson on things like respect, leadership, teamwork — communication is one he just did,” Big Brothers Big Sisters school-based coordinator Payton Hina said in July. “After that we just play games. Sometimes we try to relate it to their lesson, but sometimes the kids just like to play a random game like, they like to play kickball. Chris (Andrews) will always be the pitcher for that.”

The original intent of the program was to connect children in the community with law enforcement, as well as keep children involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters during the summer months. And the program has blossomed from there as many children return to their day camps year after year.

“It’s really to build the positive relationships with the kids with law enforcement because sometimes they might have a negative view on law enforcement depending on their backgrounds and home lives,” Hina, who has been in-charge of the program for two years, said.

Andrews echoed Hina’s remarks stating that children do not always have a positive outlook on law enforcement.

“I came around in 2014, and you gotta remember we didn’t have a whole lot of school resource officers, the kids didn’t have a lot of exposure to police officers,” Andrews said. “So these kids, all they would have is, oh somebody took my dad to jail or my mom to jail or these cops are taking someone to jail. It’s just really, really nice to be able to get out with these kids and hang out with them and joke around with them.”

Throughout the summer as Andrews teaches lessons, he’ll wear different uniforms to help familiarize children with all different positions within the police department.

This summer, two instances in particular stood out to Andrews.

The first day Andrews went to one of the day camps, a young students immediately began crying. After talking to the student, it was discovered that they did not like the police.

By the end of the summer, while Andrews said the two were not best friends, the student was engaged in the lessons and would joke and play with the group when Andrews was there.

Another time, Andrews had to make a visit to Christ’s Table, and upon his arrival, he saw many students from the Civic League volunteering and they all recognized him and were happy to see him outside of camp.

“It’s so rewarding to be able to watch a lot of these kids be able to put some stability in their life, a lot of them don’t have that,” Andrews said. “You go back and you see the same kids over and over again and you just see them get older and you see ‘em out and they say hi to you.”

With no intent of leaving the program, Andrews said he’s appreciative to Zanesville Police Chief Tony Coury for allowing him to take time out of the day to mentor these children. Andrews added that he’s working to get more first responders involved in the program, including the Zanesville Fire Department and local school resource officers.

“It’s a really good program. These are the kind of programs the community doesn’t realize happen, but it happens all the time,” Andrews said. “These are things that I think, when you get into law enforcement they don’t tell you about these kinds of things but I think they’re kind of essential for us to be able to communicate back and forth with the public.”