Grade-schoolers in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, spent part of their summer vacation learning how police fly drones. Officer Nathan Keener and School Resource Officer Matthew Edwards brought the Beaver Dam Police Department drone unit to the city’s Intro to Police Work summer school class, a course so popular with kids entering first through fifth grade that it runs a waiting list.
This is the same small-city drone team DroneXL wrote about in October 2024, when its thermal camera found a fleeing suspect near the Rock River in about a minute. Now the officers who fly those calls are explaining them to kids who haven’t finished elementary school.
A Class in Its Third Year With a Waiting List
Intro to Police Work is a summer school course in Beaver Dam, a Dodge County city of 16,708 residents about 39 miles (63 km) northeast of Madison, that gives children entering first through fifth grade direct contact with real police work, and the class is now in its third year.
It fills up fast. According to the department, the course has become one of its most requested summer school offerings and often carries a waiting list, as local outlet Daily Dodge reported on July 17.
The kids get their hands on almost everything. Over the course they roll through fingerprinting, handcuffing demonstrations, K-9 presentations, patrol vehicle tours, police radio 10-codes, and traffic stop scenarios.
The drone presentation slots into that lineup. Keener and Edwards walked the students through what the unit’s aircraft actually do on a call, not a highlight reel, but the working missions the team flies for real.
Six Years of Drone Flights and Four Certified Pilots
The Beaver Dam Police Department says its drone unit has served the community for the past six years, staffed by a four-member team of officers who each earned an FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate before joining, the same commercial credential every civilian drone operator in America flies under.
That detail matters more than it sounds. Part 107 means a written aeronautical knowledge exam at an FAA-approved testing center plus recurrent training to stay current. These officers passed the same test any commercial drone pilot takes.
The students heard where those flight hours go. Per the department, the team searches for missing people and fleeing suspects, drops life preservers to people in trouble during water rescues, flies tactical interior missions during high-risk calls and open-door checks, and inspects vehicle interiors from a distance during high-risk stops.
Interior tactical flying is the detail that stood out to me. Flying indoors means no GPS, tight clearances, and constant obstacle risk. It’s a capability you expect from a big-city tactical budget, not from a department this size.
The life preserver drops deserve a second look too. A drone reaches a struggling swimmer faster than anyone can launch a boat, and Beaver Dam sits on a lake and a river. That mission alone justifies the unit for a town built around water.
The Same Team Found a Fleeing Suspect in a Minute
DroneXL readers have met this team before: in October 2024, Beaver Dam officers flew their thermal-equipped drone over a wooded area near the Rock River in neighboring Waupun and located a fleeing suspect almost immediately after the aircraft went up.
Lieutenant Jeremiah Johnson described it at the time: “We got the drone up for about maybe a minute…to look around…found a couple of red dots we wanted to check out…literally the first one that we went to was the suspect.”
The 28-year-old man had run from a domestic disturbance call on West Jefferson Street and hidden in the trees. Waupun police called in Beaver Dam’s drone team, and the search ended in roughly the time it takes to read this section.
That call had Waupun and Fond du Lac authorities working off what Beaver Dam’s drone saw. One trained municipal team ends up covering a whole corner of Wisconsin.
So the officers standing in front of those students weren’t doing show-and-tell with a toy. They fly the calls where minutes decide outcomes, and now they’re the ones explaining the job to the youngest audience in town.
DroneXL’s Take
The drone industry’s future pilots get made in rooms exactly like that classroom, and the industry barely notices it happening.
DroneXL has documented this pattern from more than one angle. In March we reported that 145 Oklahoma schools run aerospace STEM programs built around AOPA’s free You Can Fly curriculum, with a drone track that ends in a Part 107 certificate. In December we covered a Tiffin, Ohio police officer teaching drone lessons at his local high school.
Add Beaver Dam and the ladder gets a bottom rung. The federal side already built the upper ones: the FAA launched its UAS Collegiate Training Initiative in April 2020, under a mandate from the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act, to recognize colleges that prepare students for drone careers.
Follow the path. A kid in that Beaver Dam classroom can go from summer school to a high school drone curriculum to an FAA-recognized college program to a Part 107 job, every rung documented and public.
And the four officers running Beaver Dam’s unit already hold the certificate that path leads to. When Keener and Edwards stand in front of a class, kids see the job as something a person from their own town does. That beats any recruiting brochure the industry has ever printed.
The detail I’d bet sticks with those kids has nothing to do with chases. Beaver Dam’s drones drop life preservers. A generation that meets police drones as rescue tools first starts the surveillance conversation from a different place than their parents did.
Whether a class of first-graders converts into Part 107 pilots a decade from now is an open question, not a prediction. What’s already on the record: a third-year class with a waiting list in one small Wisconsin city. A department six years into its drone program that sends its pilots into classrooms is doing succession planning for the whole industry, whether it calls it that or not.
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