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My Coast Guard
Commentary | Nov. 16, 2020

Increasing boarding officer graduates at the Maritime Law Enforcement Academy for FY21

By Janki Patel, MyCG Writer

FORCECOM has increased Boarding Officer (BO) “C” school training availability by 15%. Fiscal year 2021 training will see an increase of 100 additional seats to better support unit requests, and to support the readiness needs of the Coast Guard. This availability is further supported by the fact that every maritime enforcement (ME) specialist graduating “A” school will receive BO training prior to graduation. 

The service needs 450 BO "C" school graduates every year to maintain operational readiness. However, the Coast Guard's Maritime Law Enforcement Program Office (CG-MLE), who determines that requirement, receives more than double that amount in training requests from field units - more than 1,250 requests on average. Understanding this need, in FY21 the Maritime Law Enforcement Academy (MLEA) has scheduled a capacity increase for BO “C” School training to 816 students. Prior to this increase, MLEA was training between 650 and 720 students at BO “C” schools. 

The two “C” schools which provide BO training are the  Boarding Officer Practical Course (BOPC) with 456 scheduled FY21 seats and the  Basic Boarding Officer Course (BBOC) with 360 scheduled FY21 seats. In FY20, the ME “A” school curriculum was updated to include Boarding Officer (BO) training equivalent to BO “C” schools. In the future, this will free up additional BO school quotas. 

“We’ve already received a lot of positive feedback from the field. Just to be clear, we’ve been able to increase “C” school seats by about 100 this year by scheduling more BOPC convenings. In FY21, we have scheduled 19 BOPC convenings and 15 BBOC convenings,” said Cmdr. David A. Torres, the Operations Branch in FORCECOM, Training Division. “In addition, from July 2020 every ME “A” school graduate receives BO training from the MLEA, in Fiscal Year 21 that means there will be an additional 216 boarding officers from the new ME3s alone.”

CG-MLE-2 has created a prioritization system to ensure units with an operational necessity based on established critical thresholds receive precedence for BO school quotas. This system categorizes electronic training requests (ETRs) as priority one, two, or three. Priority one ETRs denote requests from units with the greatest need. 

Frequently asked questions:

Q. Why do I have to do restriction of movement (ROM) on-site for BO school- why isn’t it an at home ROM according to ALCOAST 408/20? 
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) is the hosting site for this training, and we have to abide by their requirements for COVID precautions. As of November 2020 FLETC requires a 10-day onsite restriction of movement (ROM) with testing prior to commencing training. 

 

How to submit a priority 1/2 Boarding Officer "C" school request:
You will need your CAC to access ACN 096/20 answering this question. 

Where can I see the priority one or two wait list?
You will need your CAC to access the portal page.

Additional Boarding Officer Prioritization FAQs

Do you have additional questions about Boarding School training? Contact Cmdr. David A. Torres, phone: (202) 475-5482.