NEDERLAND — Peyton Collins became the newest member of the Nederland Police Department this week, as the force fills some holes following retirements and opening of new positions.

Assistant Chief of Police Andrew Arnold said Collins will begin field training Friday.

“It will be a four-month training process to get him up to speed on the Nederland PD procedures,” Arnold said. “He’ll learn how to use the equipment and get the orientation to the city.”

The rookie officer is from Orange County, Arnold said.

“He’s fresh out of the academy,” he added. “His stepdad is the West Orange PD chief of police.”

One of the reasons that NPD is hiring is to fill positions left open after two officers transfer to become school resource officers, Arnold said.

“We have one SRO, currently,” he said. “We’ve had an SRO program since 2001. We’re just expanding our SRO program to having three officers.”

Arnold said the department has not selected the two new SROs yet, but expects to make a selection within the next month.

“The way all of that goes is off the fiscal year,” he said. “Our fiscal year doesn’t go in effect until October. We want to select those positions from within the department. If you take a brand new officer, they don’t have the skills that are required to go work in an environment like that.

“The school resource officers stay pretty busy. You want them to have the basic fundamentals of being a police officer and be able to add on to that.”

Arnold said that the SRO program would also help set positive images of police officers to children.

“That’s very important to us,” he said. “Our department is very community oriented. We are in good relations with every aspect of our community. If you look at our Facebook page, it says ‘Policing with the community.’ Really, we have to. Every citizen is important to us.

“When we go into training, we say our community supports us, but we give them the same respect. It’s a two-way street. We get cookies and stuff and kids will draw us pictures all of the time. Other departments don’t get that. They do occasionally, but we have that all of the time. It’s because we have a really good relationship.”

Along with the two SRO positions, NPD is still looking to hire another officer and is currently testing for a patrol sergeant.

“It’s an internal thing,” Arnold said. “We had six patrol officers that took the initial test and now we are down to three. Those three will be doing interviews next week. Whoever comes out on top will become the next patrol sergeant.”