The Sixteen Missing Hours
Recruit Dana Whitfield completed the 408-hour Basic Law Enforcement Training Course at a regional academy and passed the Georgia POST basic exam on her first attempt. During week seven she contracted influenza and missed 16 hours of instruction-two full days covering crisis intervention and report writing. The academy's training coordinator allowed her to make up the material through an online module the academy developed internally; the module was never submitted to POST for approval. Whitfield's attendance record in the academy's student management system shows the 16 hours as completed, and her agency's certification officer has the packet ready to submit to POST, believing the exam pass is sufficient. The agency wants her on the street next week and has already scheduled her for field training. The academy director mentions casually that 'POST only audits a small percentage of packets.'
1. Should the agency submit Whitfield's certification packet now? Explain the reasoning and identify the specific defect.
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No. The packet is not certifiable yet, and the problem is the 16 hours, not the exam.
- Georgia's basic certification rests on completing a POST-approved basic course. The approved course is a package: its hour allocations and lesson plans are what POST approved. An academy-developed online module that was never submitted to POST is not an approved substitute for two days of the approved curriculum, even if the content overlaps.
- Passing the basic exam tests knowledge; it does not certify attendance or course completion. The two are separate requirements.
- Submitting a packet that reports the 16 hours as completed, when the approved course was not completed, is a records-integrity problem. It exposes Whitfield's certification and the academy's approval status, and it is exactly the kind of issue a POST audit or a later decertification complaint can surface.
- The director's 'audits are rare' comment is irrelevant to the rule and is not a risk-management rationale.
Remedy: Whitfield should make up the two missed days in a POST-approved delivery-either the next academy cycle's blocks or an approved equivalent-and the certification officer should submit only after that documentation exists.
2. What should the certification officer do about the academy's student record showing 16 hours as completed?
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Treat the student record as a claim to be verified, not proof.
- Ask the academy to provide the POST course approval number and the approved lesson plan for the make-up module. If it has no approval number, the record is wrong on its face.
- Request that the academy either correct the attendance record to show the hours as incomplete or annotate the file with the remediation plan and date. Do not allow a corrected record to be created retroactively after the make-up is completed in an approved setting-dates matter.
- If the academy refuses to correct the record, the certification officer should not submit the packet. Escalate in writing to the academy director and to POST's training division, and keep the correspondence.
- When Whitfield repeats the two days in an approved course, obtain a transcript or certificate showing the specific blocks and hours, then attach it to the packet.
The certification officer's duty runs to the accuracy of the submission, not to the agency's staffing schedule. Field training can start only after certification; a week's delay is cheaper than a revoked certification.