COOS BAY — When law enforcement and perpetrators get together, it’s rarely a pleasant scene.

But on a very damp Wednesday this week, members of the Coos Bay Police Officers Association got their hands dirty with a number of teen offenders to replace the siding and install new windows on a school building in Empire.

The teens, who all are attending classes through the Coos County Youth Opportunity Program, also known as Court School, not only got a chance to improve their campus, they also got to see that police officers are people just like them. The project is expected to be completed today.

After spending most of the morning pulling nails and picking up trash around the project site, 15-year-old Jake said working with police was kind of fun.

“It’s kind of weird. I’ve never really associated with cops before, but they’re cool,” Jake said after stepping out of the rain. “I guess I just kind of misjudged them.”

He added that the officers taught him and his classmates how to do some of the work.

“I think it’s cool. We’re putting the school back together,” Jake said.

The Cow Creek Tribe paid for the siding project for the school at the Alternative Youth Activities Inc. property at 575 S. Main St. in Empire.

 Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, Patrol Sgt. Chris Chapanar hardly looked like a police officer. One of the organizers for the project, he said it gave him and other handy police officers a chance to work side-by-side with teens they may have arrested in the past.

“(It’s) an opportunity to take the uniform off and work with some of the kids,” Chapanar said. “A lot of the youth, the only contact they’ve had with police officers is negative. This is an opportunity for them to see us in a different light.”

Probation Officer Jessica Patterson, who works with the teens regularly through the Youth Opportunity Program, said about 13 students go to the school. Judges require students to attend court school and while there, they can make up missed credits from public school, do community service and participate in drug and alcohol treatment if necessary.

This week, students are off school, she explained, so all came to help voluntarily.

“This is kind of a class project for them to give back to the school ... as well as working with local officers. Usually they only get to see them when they’re not doing well,” Patterson said. “A lot of them have made comments that they get to see the officers as humans. That they’re kind of cool.”

The siding project became necessary, Patterson explained, because the old siding contained asbestos. Also, the building had single-pane windows, which made it cold even in the summer. The new windows are energy-efficient vinyl.

Beyond making the building more comfortable and attractive, the project also will give students more pride in their school, said Alice Carlson, the executive director of AYA.

“(We have) kids who many times have come from not-the-best backgrounds and they come out here to a school that looks like nobody cares about it. And some of them feel like nobody cares about them,” Carlson said. “We want to change that. We want them to have a place where they can go to school and feel proud.”

Carlson added that Coos Bay Police Chief Rodger Craddock, who also serves as the chairman of the AYA board of directors, came up with the idea to pair officers with the teens.

“We were just thinking, if they could be working together on a project, they could see each other in a different way,” Carlson said, adding they also lunched together. “I’ve already heard that happening.”

On Thursday, Craddock said the siding project is as good for officers as it is for the kids.

He added that officers can become jaded if they don’t socialize with community members, because they only deal with 5 percent of the population, and most are either victims or perpetrators.

“We see people when they’re not having their best day,” Craddock said. “They need to know some of the people they come in contact with ... they’re not always like that.”

In addition to the officers and teens, a couple parents helped with the project.

A carpenter, manager of Restoration and Building Services in Coos Bay and a father of a Court School teen, Kent Wagner said he wanted to lend his skills to the project.

“It’s just the thing a good person would do,” he said. “It’s fun to get to work with (my daughter) a little bit. It was fun to watch her drive a nail — she’d never done that before.”

Since she joined court school, her behavior has started to turn around, Wagner said.

“The whole court program has helped her change her attitude. She’s going to be a useful person now.”