Sarah Bosch’s dream of becoming a career police officer was cut short by a series of traumatic incidents she experienced very early in her police career.
But she found a new way to be a positive influence in her community by retraining as a teacher, recently completing her Master of Teaching at the University of Tasmania.
Sarah grew up on Tasmania’s North West Coast and had dreamed of becoming a police officer since she was 14 years old. And when she graduated from the police academy in 2014 – at the age of 20 – her first posting was back home in the north-west.
“I loved it, I worked with a good team and, yeah, you're just exposed to a lot, you learn very quickly,” she said.
Within Sarah’s first two years on the job, she attended three significant critical incidents – all within six months of each other, all putting her life in danger, and all involving a death or near-death encounter.
“I feel I’m very lucky to be alive today.”
After just three years as a police officer, Sarah was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, after continuing in her job for a few more years, eventually realised she couldn’t go on.
“The treatment I received was great, but when you're still in that environment, you can't fully recover,” she said.
“Realising that I couldn't continue in that job was difficult – I’d dreamed of it since I was 14.”
Then, on a trip to Nepal with friends in 2017, Sarah delivered 10kg of pencils to a women’s centre on behalf of the Pencils Community charity, and the experience changed her whole trajectory.
“Giving the women those pencils, just meeting them, it was like I'd handed them gold or something. I didn't realise it would mean that much.
“I'd been struggling a lot with my mental health and doing that just sparked something inside me. It showed me there is meaningful work for me, there's things that we can do in the world that make a real difference.”
As a result, Sarah co-founded the Lion Heart charity, which continued to support communities in Nepal. Part of her work involved visiting local Tasmanian schools to collect donated pencils and to talk about her experiences.
As a police officer, Sarah had also been part of the “Adopt-A-Cop” program at local schools, and all that time spent in schools started to nudge her in a new direction.
“Teaching just sort of came to me,” she said. “I didn't consider any other career.
“I wanted to do something meaningful, I wanted to recover, I wanted to live life to the full, and still do meaningful work.”
Sarah had completed three quarters of a Bachelor of Social Science as part of her police academy training. So, after completing that degree, she enrolled in a Master of Teaching, training to be a primary school teacher.
Studying part time and online, from her home on the North West Coast, she completed her studies in five years and is going to start working as a relief teacher this year.
“I know from my policing experience that young people and children, they often don't have a good, safe, healthy role model in their life at all,” she said.
“And I just thought if I could be that person for one year in a child's life, who believes in them, who speaks words of positivity, you never know the difference that could make.”
Sarah said her experience was a reminder that our pathways in life are not always a straight line.
“It's been an important lesson for me to learn, that a job is a transient thing, you move from job to job, not to define myself by my job,” she said.
“So, it's been really good that I've been able to just move forward and let go of that previous job and step into teaching.”
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