Former Blytheville Police Officer Terry Winkles is asking the City Council to approve the anger management course he took online so that he can reinstated to the department. A packet of information submitted to the mayor was given to the Courier News.
Winkles had planned to give a copy of the packet to each Council member during Tuesday night's regular meeting, but there was not a quorum of members and the meeting was rescheduled for today.
Winkles was denied reinstatement after an appeal hearing on May 12. Police Chief Ross Thompson terminated Winkles in April after Winkles was involved in an incident of domestic violence.
In a letter prefacing the packet of information, Winkles states that he spent five hours, 46 minutes and 33 seconds on the course, plus more time for quizzes and written exercises.
The packet of materials from the class, showing an Internet log of the time he spent on each portion of the class with information on whether Winkles passed or failed quizzes on each topic.
The material also contains a letter from Ari Novick, Ph.D., of Laguna Beach, Calif., which states that the course includes eight tools of anger management and is designed to provide several hundred pages of information to the student.
"All sessions are timed. Students cannot simply click through pages and take quizzes without comprehending material," Novick states.
Students must pass a 50-question final exam and score at least 70 percent before the course is successfully completed.
According to the log, Winkles spent nearly six hours on the course over a period of two days, May 7 and 8. The log also indicates that Winkles spent only a few minutes on many lessons, although one did reflect he spent more than seven minutes on that section. The log shows that Winkles spent less than a minute on many of the sections.
Each section covered one page of a topic and a quiz was given after each section, the log indicates. Of the 64 quizzes given, Winkles failed eight of them, according to the log.
The log indicates that the course's final exam was passed at 5:52 a.m. on May 8 and the course was completed.
The packet also contains information stating that the cost of the course was $230, and was paid at 11:18 a.m. on May 7, 2009, by a credit card belonging to Joyce A. Winkles for an eight-hour anger management course.