Making Choices
FBI agent-turned teacher has special sotry to tell students
By Bobbi Mlynar
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Emporia Middle School cafetorium filled with eighth-graders Tuesday morning for a special conversation with a former FBI agent who moved away from law enforcement and into education.
Tracey Repp, math teacher at Andover Middle School, came to Emporia this week as part of the 2010 Kansas Teacher of the Year Team, which is visiting schools across the state during this school year. EMS CONNECTS teacher Jeline Harclerode, a finalist for Kansas Teacher of the Year, also is a member of the team.
Repp had been an officer with the Wichita Police Department for many years before becoming a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His stint in Wichita included assignments with the investigation division, as well as on bike patrol and horse patrol; he said the latter assignment was his second-favorite of all the law-enforcement work.
His least-favorite was knocking on doors of family members whose child or husband or father had been killed, whether from a vehicle accident involving a drunk driver or from a drug deal gone bad.
“Guys, there’s nothing worse than having to knock on the door in the middle of the night and having to tell them someone’s dead,” Repp said. “... I left law enforcement because I wanted to be in a classroom and make a difference in kids in a different way than I was in law enforcement.”
He acknowledged the perquisites of being an officer were something he enjoyed.
“There’s some fun things you can do,” he said. “There are some challenging things you can do; there are some dangerous things you can do.”
From rappelling into a compound from a helicopter to taking on a different persona to infiltrate the drug culture, Repp talked to the students about life before he became a teacher. He showed slides to illustrate the transformation from a police officer’s appearance to his role as an undercover drug user.
“I didn’t do any, but I bought every kind of drug you can think of,” he said.
He never got hurt, other than a few broken bones, he said, and he was never shot.
“Shot at, never hit,” he said.
He changed his identity and his way of dressing, and had his ears pierced as he morphed into a man who could fit in with the criminal element. His neatly trimmed hair grew long enough to spike, and eventually have styled into corn rows.
“My wife said, ‘Let’s put that in some rubber bands, and have some fun with it,” Repp recalled her saying.
He used the change in his appearance as an object lesson for any young person who might feel safe using drugs with, or buying drugs from, someone who looked like the role he was playing.
“You never know who you’re selling to or buying from,” Repp said.
He worked undercover in the drug culture for months at a time, building cases against the new “friends” he’d made among the drug users.
It was a life that he might have lived himself if he had not chosen a different path.
Repp said that his parents divorced when he was a young child, remarried later and separated again. His mother was an addict and his father was absent. He likened the difficulties he faced growing up to similar difficult situations the students in the cafetorium were dealing with on a day-to-day basis now.
“I will not promise you that life is full of easy choices,” Repp said. “... I can only ask you to make the right choices. It’s up to you. Guys, you can overcome a lot of things. .... It’s not easy, but you can do it.”
The basis for the decision starts with knowledge about the drugs, whether it is marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, Ecstasy or inhalants that temporarily give a false feeling of relief from the difficulties and hurts of life. But people who use those drugs are not fooling anyone, not even themselves.
“You know those are drugs, and you know they’re illegal to possess. You know they’re illegal to use; you know they’re illegal to sell; you know they’re bad,” Repp said.
Drug users justify breaking the law with a number of pat excuses: everyone else is doing it. I want to fit in. It doesn’t hurt anyone.
“Excuses, all of them, and I don’t buy any one of them,” Repp said. “I stand here and tell you that it does hurt others, and you don’t have to do it to fit in. That’s a cop-out.”
It’s something the youngsters can decide on their own to avoid, even when siblings, parents even grandparents are using drugs.
“Perhaps this is an opportunity for you to break that generational (cycle),” he said. “If you want things for yourself, you can do it. Just please understand the road will be difficult and you’re going to have to challenge yourself.”
Repp showed a series of pictures taken of a methamphetamine user over a 10-year period. The students reacted audibly, from gasps to groans, as they watched the face of a woman age from relative youth to a sunken-cheeked, rotten-toothed crone with dark circles under her eyes.
“Look at her face,” he said, telling the students there was no such thing as recreational use of drugs. “She’s lost bone structure. ... Her life is ruined. That’s what happens when you put chemical pollution into your bodies. It destroys you from within. We all have the opportunity not to get involved in all the noise you see up here.”
Repp said he had a different point of view on drugs because he’d lived the drug-culture life during FBI investigations.
“I have images in my mind that I’ll never be able to let go of,” he said.
He asked them to make good decisions and not to let themselves be drawn away from the goals they set for themselves, no matter what others around them are doing.
“If for nobody else but yourself, do something you’ll be proud of,” Repp said. “... If you make a good decision, you’ll know it. I’m just going to ask that you lead this class into making good decisions.”
Other members of the KTOY team who were here to work with Emporia teachers and exchange information were: Karen Tritt, foreign language teacher at Shawnee Mission West and Kansas Teacher of the Year; and regional KTOY finalists Joan Moore, first grade, McPherson; Kathy Durano, third grade, Andover; Arthur Commons, science, Baxter Springs; Rose Nemchik, resource teacher, DeSoto; Beth Slawson, reading strategist, Paola; and Jeline Harclerode, CONNECT teacher, Emporia.