The chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Social Work & Sociology is implementing more testing safeguards at SEMO’s Law Enforcement Academy after allegations of cheating on the Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) exam earlier this year.
Brian Donavant has made changes to the testing as the university emerges from accusations of cheating by the university's former police chief, Richard Flotron.
Flotron was terminated by SEMO and charged with two counts of a Class D felony for forgery and two Class B misdemeanors for unauthorized use of testing materials for allegedly helping students cheat on the POST exam. According to Missouri statutes, a defendant with one Class D felony may see up to seven years of prison time, and a Class B misdemeanor can result in up to six months in jail.
According to the Missouri Department of Public Safety, POST is a regulatory program responsible for licensing peace officers as well as “licenses law enforcement basic training centers, basic training instructors, approves law enforcement training curricula and provides staff support for the Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission.”
Donavant said the Law Enforcement Academy is going to conduct the test in the university testing center that has proctors and secure facilities. Donavant has also been utilizing the Canvas platform and communicating with Online Services to ensure academic integrity.
“Obviously, we're not going to tolerate any [cheating].” That's just not acceptable in any environment, whether it's law enforcement training or academic programming here at the university,” Donavant said.
“We're very well adapted to making sure that we keep those safeguards in place through our academic programming, so we can bring some of those safeguards into the academy to ensure the integrity there.”
Last year, in June 2025, the Law Enforcement Academy was renamed to the Police Academy and reported to Flotron after receiving $1.5 million in upgrades. Later in November, Dane Stausing was hired as the new director of the Police Academy. Currently, according to SEMO’s website, the name has been changed back to Law Enforcement Academy, and Dane Stausing is no longer listed as part of the faculty.
Donavant said the University is looking for a new Law Enforcement Academy director to handle day-to-day operations. Capt. Jason Morgan is serving as interim Chief of Police while the search is being conducted.
“The academy was part of the department several years ago when it was originally started, and it's moved to different units within the university over the years, and it's now back with us. And so we've got to we've got to get things coordinated and re-integrated into the department,” Donavant said.
Following Flotron’s termination, a class of cadets still had to pass the POST exam, despite the controversy.
“You can imagine when I took over responsibility for the academy, there were three weeks left in the cadet class that we had going at that time, and so those cadets were a little bit shell-shocked,” Donavant said.
“They were a little bit concerned. They were a little anxious, but we stepped in. We got them through. We finished their class. Every cadet in that class that was in it when we took over the program back last spring, every one of those graduated, did very well on the POST exam. We had already implemented at that point the new testing procedures for the POST exam, which is the state exam, and they did very well on that.”
While the criminal justice degree has had a large increase in enrollment due to it becoming a 90-credit-hour program, Donavant said the Law Enforcement Academy enrollment is “holding.”
“There are some folks that still have kind of a wait-and-see perspective on how things shake out at the academy under the new leadership, and that's understandable,” Donavant said. “But we're excited about what's coming in. We've done a lot of upgrades here at the academy. We've got a lot of new technology that we're going to be using for training the cadets.”