Councilman Awards FTPD Officer First ‘Workforce Diversity Scholarship’

Township Councilman Ram Anbarasan often talks about promoting diversity in the township workforce, and on February 8, he let his money do the talking for him.

Anbarasan awarded his first $2,000 Workforce Diversity Scholarship to Michael Stallings, one of the newer Franklin Township Police Department hires.

Stallings paid his own way through the police academy, a bill that totaled $5,000.

“I came up with idea to promote workforce diversity in town by helping people of color to join our PD,” Anbarasan wrote in a text message. “Our first recipient is Off. Stallings who is a Franklin resident and paid out of his pocket to attend the Police Academy and became our employee.”

Stallings, a Franklin native, said he always wanted to be a part of the FTPD.

“The officers here, the community here, turned me into the person I am today,” Stallings said. “I started off starting as a security guard in the schools, and now I’m a police officer for the whole town.”

“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to pay down some of the loan I did incur to go to the police academy,” he said.

“He’s shown he’s part of the team and wants to be here,” Public Safety Director Quovella Maeweather said. “That’s the first sign of a successful officer.”

“We hire officers who have a passion for Franklin Township,” she said. “Having been here almost two years, I see the diversity, I see the strength in the department and we’re just going to build on that.”

Township Manager Robert Vornlocker, a former township police officer, said that he has “had the pleasure over the course of my career of working with several of the Stallings family, including his mother, when she was pregnant with him.”

“I’m very happy to have him, and he’s a very fine young man,” he said.

Vornlocker said that to see Stallings as a police officer “warms my heart.”

Anbarasan said that he intends to make the scholarship award an annual event.

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