James Lentscher had always wanted to earn a college degree and be a police officer.

But the married father of three and Iraq War veteran had been stuck selling office supplies until his wife told him to go ahead and pursue his goal.

So for the past seven months, the 32-year-old Woodbine resident buckled down and achieved both goals through  an intensive new degree program coordinated between the Howard County Police Department and Howard  Community College.

“It’s brutal. It’s not watered down, that’s for sure,” Lentscher said May 22 prior to receiving an associate’s degree in police science at Howard Community College’s commencement.

The new program allows those accepted into the county’s police academy to earn an associate’s degree while concurrently completing the academy’s training requirements, according to Sgt. Gordon Carpenter, a coordinator for police academy classes.

New recruits to the police department are required to have 60 college credits and to have completed the department’s police academy, Carpenter said. Information on the number of county officers holding college degrees was not immediately available.

The new program was formed to enable recruits who did not have the required college course work to obtain the necessary credits, Carpenter said.

“We might be able to reach out and get candidates that we typically wouldn’t be able to get with a 60-credit requirement,” Carpenter said. “I think it’s a win for the police department, I think it’s a win for the community college and it’s a win for the community.”

In addition to routine classes at the academy on firearms, emergency vehicle operations and criminal investigations, Lentscher and three others in the program’s inaugural class also took courses in English, sociology, biology, constitutional law and criminal law through the community college, Carpenter said.

The police academy usually draws about 25 new recruits each session, and so far only four have elected to take the joint degree program, Carpenter said. The word had not gotten out to many new recruits yet, and also many new recruits already hold academic degrees, Carpenter said. He said the number electing to take the program had doubled for the next police academy.

Three of the four recruits who elected to take the program graduated May 22, joining about 300 other Howard Community College students in getting their degrees, according to a college spokeswoman. The three who got their degrees through the joint program will have the cost of the degree — about $4,000 per student — picked up by the police department, according to a college spokesman. The fourth candidate has yet to graduate, Carpenter said.

Charles Reed, 22, of North Laurel, said the program had given him a better understanding of how to serve the community while John Campbell, 24, of Sykesville, said he joined the U.S. Army straight out of high school and never had the opportunity to go to college. He chose to pursue a position with the Howard County Police Department because it offered the academic program, he said.

“I had offers from other departments and this one had a degree program,” he said, adding that the program gave him the opportunity to “kill two birds with one stone.”

Lentscher, meanwhile, said he is planning to work toward a bachelor’s degree, and Campbell said that while he was starting on patrol he ultimately wanted to go into some kind of criminal investigation work and hoped that his degree would give him a leg up in achieving that goal.

“Hopefully I can build off it and advance my career,” he said.

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