At SJS, the 7^th & 8^th grade P.E. classes are helping me prepare for my physical fitness test.  Today’s challenge was a plank challenge. Appropriate physical fitness for school safety and security personnel is extremely important to me.  It goes hand in hand with officer presence, and studies and after action reports have shown that appropriate officer presence is the number one deterrent in combating intruders, as well as the most cost effective.  Coming from law enforcement, a lot of people may not realize that, unless you are in a specialized unit like SWAT or special operations, the fitness test that one takes to become a law enforcement officer, is the last one that they take.  I have always found this problematic, so when I got hired on at St. Jude, I wrote an annual fitness test into our SSO policy.   I can say, with confidence, that St. Jude School is the only school in the Chattanooga area (public or private) that has an on-going fitness standard for their SSO or school security personnel.  The three students pictured received a SSO challenge coin for making it to the four minute mark with me.