(COLORADO SPRINGS) — The 8th Annual Pikes Peak Regional Law Enforcement Teen Academy is in session at Cheyenne Mountain High School the week of June 19.

This is the second week of the Academy — last week it was hosted at Vista Ridge High School.

The Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office are the host agencies for the event. Several other local law enforcement agencies were also in attendance to help teach teens in the community.

“We all work together in law enforcement, and we all come together for the common goal in educating some of the teens, showing them our side of life, and hopefully arming them with some new information that they may not have had previously,” said Sergeant Phillip Tollefson with CSPD.

The Colorado Springs Police Department and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office were the hosts of the event.

Teens ages 13 to 17 were invited to the academy, including Darius Schmidt who shared his aspirations to one day become a cop.

“I wanted to be a cop for a long, long time,” Schmidt said. “And it’s been a thing in my family everyone’s wanted to do, but none of them has been able to do it. And it’s just something I wanted to just make someone proud of my family and it’s something I can do and something I believe in that I can go on to do.”

Throughout the afternoon, the teens were sent in pairs to handle real world situations and then received feedback from their team leaders.

Four scenarios were set up for the teens to work through.

“Some of the scenarios, the kids go in there with an initial thought of how it’s going to turn out and it completely turns sideways on them,” Tollefson said. “So it’s a lot like a normal call for service. The presenters, the two architects of this program that kind of put the initial scenarios together, took them off of real world calls that they had handled or other officers that handled.”

In one scenario, four teens had to help calm down a cashier and try to help an individual in a mental health crisis.

“So that particular scenario is the scenario that officers encounter almost on a daily basis at some location in Colorado Springs,” Tollefson said. “And that scenario, we have an individual suffering some type of mental health crisis who is lawfully on the property but is causing a disturbance, is making people uncomfortable to the point in time that the store owners, the managers, the employees there, they want that person out of the store so they can continue to operate.”

Scenario four where teens work on communication skills with an individual having a mental health crisis.

During this scenario, Schmidt remained calm and collected in handling the situation.

“I wanted to just get things like I wanted to get everything categorized and know what was happening,” Schmidt said. “So I knew what was the situation so I could handle it professionally and not have anything happen, like a mistake, like an issue or any violence.”

Several activities also took place outside, to educate the teens on distracted and drunk driving.

“We partnered with Centura Health this year, and so they were nice enough to come out to our location and bring us their peddle karts,” Tollefson said. “So we have the teens going through distracted driving or drunk driving simulations. We have a little bit of an obstacle course here.”

One teen tried to navigate through the obstacle course wearing the drunk impairment goggles.

For Daniella Calloway, she shared the impact the academy will have on her.

“I think it’s very helpful with communication as well and just trusting the people that you are working with,” said Calloway.

The week-long teen academy serves as an opportunity to bring more awareness into careers in law enforcement.

“A lot of kids have come in and they’ve asked, ‘how do I become a cadet? How do I pursue a career in law enforcement’?” Tollefson said. “They have conversations with detectives that come in here and try and see that’s a career path that they want to go and so they have an opportunity to engage… with those officers, detectives and so forth towards pursuing a real-life goal that they may have.”

The academy bringing new skills and tools to help future officers like Schmidt succeed.

“I am very grateful that they’re willing to take time out of their day and do what they need to teach us kids and teenagers out here just what it’s like,” Schmidt said. “So, we get an understanding… it just helps us out, realizing more about what we want to go into and stuff like that.”