On Wednesday morning at Antioch Middle School, Antioch Police Chief Allan Cantando delivered donuts to the winning team of Lego’s and the Law held last week.
Cantando explained the idea behind the event was to increase engagement between law enforcement and students in hopes of connecting with students.
Students were given an “Antioch Police Lego Exercise” where they had to create a team name in under 2-minutes, build a lego model quickly with a total of 30-minutes maximum and they could only have 2-people on a team build the model at one time. The caveat was the team could not look at instructions and instead had another team member explain verbally what to build. The team who build it first won.
The kits were in a set of 100-pieces and ultimately could have three different models that could be built.
“The exercise was a way to reward some of their top students to allow them to interact with the chief for that day,” explained Cantando. “We thought lets do lego’s and make it a competition – but also a learning exercise. Everyone built something different.”
Cantando further explained that that upon completion, they discussed why team names were chosen, leadership and the importance of communication.
“I asked the group about who was the leader. It came to be that the group pointed to a student them deemed as the leader. That student then said he was just giving directions,” explained Cantando. “It gave us the opportunity to talk about both formal and informal leaders and a variety of examples of how that could occur in life and in professional settings.”
He noted in the police department alone, as police chief, he is a formal leader, but within the department, others are leaders in a variety of other ways without a specific title.
“
In this exercise, no one was deemed the leader,” said Cantando. “Instead, informal leaders surfaced. One person took the lead but the others accepted it and they ended up winning.”
Cantando says he enjoys working with Antioch youth saying it was fun because they took it seriously and were so energetic saying that he probably enjoyed it more than they did.
He also highlighted that the best thing about the exercise was the discussion on leadership.
“The coolest thing was how within the groups, how quickly someone stepped up to a leadership position and how well they communicated for middle school students. I did not expect any group to complete building that model within the 30 minute time frame, but they did it in half,” said Cantando. “I was extremely impressed.”
Antioch Middle School Principal Lindsay Lopez-Wisely says she was grateful for Cantando working with students.
“I am grateful for Chief Cantando’s leadership. He has taken a lot of time at AMS to positively impact our students. Through the Legos with the Law, morning donuts, and visits to our campus, students are building great, positive relationships with law enforcement,” said Lindsay Lopez-Wisely.
Cantando hopes that events like this and other upcoming engagement sessions with youths will help students become more familiar with law enforcement and build a relationship with officers. He also hopes a few of them will become future police officers.
