Officer Karl Staats is our first line of defense and the loyal protector of Carmel Christian School. Students will see the beloved cop walking around campus at school. However, not many people know the backstory behind Staats’s badge.

Staats was born in 1967 in Ossining, New York, which is very similar to his current town of Matthews. Ossining is around thirty minutes outside of New York City so he grew up in a quiet neighborhood. Staats described his hometown saying, “…small roads, green trees, not big sidewalks, skyscrapers or anything like that where I was.” 

Staats graduated high school at 17 years old and did not believe that college was the right path for him. Staats had a friend who was interested in joining the military. His friend encouraged Staats to take the ASVAB(Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) which is a military placement test. 

Though Staats had originally joined the program as a “buddy system” with his friend, he was the only one who followed through with the military path. The friend who introduced Staats to the program decided on another path. Staats began his 20-year military career in July of 1985. 

After Staats joined the military, he was stationed all across the world. At first, he was in Texas for training, but then he went to South America for counter-drug interdictions. He also did convoys across the Middle East and was in countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Iraq. 

Given the intense job requirements that Staats has lived through, he has a unique perspective on how to handle stressful situations.  Staats states,  “I look back on 20 years of military that I was in… you’re being put in stressful situations where it’s either going to blow up in your face or you’re going to hold on to what you have, and you’re going to sit back and try and realize what is going on.” 

After his twenty years of service in the military, he and his wife moved to Tucson. They did not want to stay in Tucson forever, but New York was too expensive. The couple decided that they should move to Charlotte because it was not as expensive as New York, and his wife was in the banking industry. 

Once Staats came to Charlotte in 2007, he joined the Matthews police force, working nights for around ten years. He and his wife settled down and raised their family in Matthews. Staats was asked where he saw himself in five to ten years by one of his superior officers. Staats responded and said that he would want to work as a school resource officer. 

After this inquiry, Staats saw an opening for a resource officer position here at Carmel Christian School. Though it was a different environment from

what he had previously done, the opportunity was exactly what he was looking for. He has been working here for around six years. He is very content with his position at Carmel and he can not voice a single complaint about his role here. 

When asked about his favorite part of Carmel, Staats said it was the students. Right now, all of Staats’s kids have grown up and gone to college. Even though their nest is empty, Staats enjoys watching the students at Carmel grow up over the last few years. Even though his family is out into the world, Staats is able to build relationships with the students here at Carmel, which is the perk of his job that he enjoys. He is an essential part of the school and the community here. Carmel would have a very different environment if it weren’t for Officer Staats’s joy-filled personality, attentive dedication and overall service-oriented life mission.