GUILDERLAND — As a school resource officer, Sean Ralston is meeting kids where they’re at.

He’s been stationed at Guilderland High School since early 2021 and started posting n">TikTok videos about a year and a half ago. He has 185,000 followers and over 10 million likes.

Ralston, at age 45 with four children of his own ranging in age from 8 to 16, is attuned to current trends in communication.

His site has this slogan: Bridging the gap one day at a time.

Ralston’s videos started, he said, when kids would ask him to be part of theirs. “I would dance on their accounts,” he said.

Some videos feature him dancing with a single student in the school hallway while others show him dancing at a huge pep rally in the high school gym or as the center of an elaborate dance with students showcasing the Indian culture.

Comments include: “I love this” and “Bro, I want to be as cool as you when I grow up!!” and “Awesome job!” and “The PD when I was in high school could never.”

In one video, titled “When you have to hide from that one student but need to stay visible,” Ralston is literally showcased, striking a pose in a display of student artwork as “that one student” walks by.

Many of the videos are accompanied with music. One featuring his own children, longing for a snow day, has a song from the Disney movie “Frozen.”

When choosing the music to accompany his videos, Ralston said, “I have to be mindful it’s not cursing.”

His own kids “think it’s cool,” Ralston said of his work. “They’ve never said anything negative about it.”

His videos are used at training sessions for other SROs and he gets inquiries from school cops around the state and across the nation about them.

“Kids love it. It’s all they do,” Ralston said of communicating through social media.

While many of his videos are playful, some strike a serious tone.

In one about the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, Ralston explains that police need probable cause to search while school administrators need only a reasonable suspicion.

“They think they can do what they want with their vapes and marijuana pens,” he said. “I was trying to educate them.”

While he takes his work seriously — protecting students he cares about — Ralston said, “If I’m always serious, serious, serious, they’re not going to approach me.”

He started as an SRO in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. A Black student, whom he says now is “one of my favorite students,” was at first “very stand-offish.”

One of his videos ends with her promposal. 

This week, Ralston said, he is visiting English classes at the high school where the students are watching a “Tough Conversations” video with a white police officer talking with a Black male. He’ll answer students’ questions after they see the video.

“Some kids don’t like police officers,” said Ralston. His goal is to “open their eyes that every officer isn’t what you see on television.”

A lot of kids who otherwise wouldn’t feel confident approaching a police officer, Ralston said, “come up to me and say, ‘I saw your TikTok. Would you do one with me?’”

Ralston already knows a lot of the students because he has coached lacrosse, basketball, and Pop Warner Football in Guilderland.

Ralston himself went to school in South Colonie. The summer he was 17, he worked at Kurver Kreme. One day, a beautiful Guilderland High School senior, Jaime, came to get ice cream.

“I just saw her. There she was. That was it,” he said.

After they graduated from high school and married, he worked in construction where he made good money as he and Jaime started their family. But he’d always harbored a desire to be a police officer, with the goal of being an investigator.

When he turned 35, Ralston passed the age where he could do so.

“I was too old. The cut-off was 35,” said Ralston.

“Me and my wife sat down,” he said, and she agreed to support him for five years while he pursued his dream.

He worked with then-Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy and then-Senator George Amedore. “They drafted legislation so I could take the exam and Governor Cuomo signed it,” said Ralston “With three kids, I was driving to Kingston five days a week.”

Kingston is where the Police Officer Preparation Academy is located. Ralston passed the exam and got a job working for the Altamont Village Police for four years before being hired by the Guilderland Police Department.

Ralston is not sure now about wanting to become an investigator some day. He loves his current work.

“I like being in the hallways, hanging out with the kids,” he said, adding he likes the administration at Guilderland’s elementary, middle, and high schools.

“With the TikToks, people realize the job is not just about security and active shooters. It’s knowing the heartbeat of the community and the trends … We care about the kids.”

Ralston concluded of his job as an SRO, “It’s who I am. I’m heavily involved in my community. I still have to be the cop and make sure the school is safe.”