Cop living at school campus must leave District studying who should pay to move his trailer.
School Police Officer Alex Lopez has stopped burglars, vandals and graffiti artists from mischief at Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary near Palm Beach Gardens — not because he walks its halls by day, but because he lives in a 2,000-square-foot mobile home on the school’s property at night, on weekends, through the summer, year-round.
Lopez occupies one of the last remaining outposts in what was once a much larger network of campus security called Vandal Watch. The programs sprouted up in the school districts of coastal Florida in the 1970s.
Campus renovations and technology are spelling the end to
the watch’s heyday. Lopez isn’t so much worried about the end of an era, but rather losing the home he bought for $58,000 cash.
Lopez said he has invested tens of thousands in the gray home with blue shutters. Over the past 13 years, he has re-roofed, installed new air conditioning, painted and landscaped. Lopez raised his son on the northwest corner of the elementary’s property. Now he’s caring for his elderly dad there.
The district says it’s up to him to pay the moving costs as well. They say it’s all part of the contract Vandal Watchers sign — except it doesn’t appear Lopez was ever asked to sign one.
As for the renovations at Eisenhower that are precipitating the move: At one time, keeping the cop trailer was part of those plans, just on a different corner, according to an email from the school’s former principal, Jim Pegg.
The trailer, built in 1995, arrived at Eisenhower some two decades ago paid for by Lawrence Leon, now the department’s outgoing chief but an officer at the time. Leon and the home replaced another officer and another trailer, he said. The job kept Leon busy.
“We had serious problems there
at the time,” Leon said. “I made numerous cases.”
Of course, there were the arrests for lesser offenses such as trespassers who tipped him off with a telltale trail of cigarette smoke.
One particularly memorable incident involved a dog that wandered into the building on the tail of a milk delivery.
“He snuck in and got stuck,” Leon recalls of the husky that proceeded to set off the alarms.
By the time Leon got inside, the panicked canine had left a trail of doggie waste through the halls. “It was a mess in there.” (It was also vindication for Leon, who’d been accused by an administrator of letting his own dog make messes on the school’s athletic fields. The true cul- prit had emerged.)
Lopez has responded to dozens of calls as well — many after most of the neighbor- hood had tucked in for the night. When the school’s alarm goes off, he’s the guy with the keys, the flashlight and the gun.
He’s caught a burglar ransacking classrooms, bags of booty collected out front and sniffed out an electrical fire in the library.
While Lopez lives at the elementary school, he’s never been assigned there for his day job. The last school he patrolled was Okeeheelee Middle in Greenacres. These days his assignments are in Lake Worth.
Still, he’s been on hand for campus emergencies in the daylight. He sat with the principal until local law enforcement arrived when she was threatened after hours by the relative of a student. He’s chased off the homeless people who set up house on a wooded edge of the campus.
Lopez figures he’s kept the basketball courts from becoming drug dealing zones when kids come there after school’s out. “I started walk- ing my dog more often when that started happening,” Lopez said.
He also keeps an eye on a nearby property he contends is the center of the occasional drug and pros- titution business.
Years ago, school districts posted officers on their outlying campuses where law enforcement response time was slower.
In 2001, 10 Palm Beach County schools remained under the care of the live-on police force. That included Boca Raton’s Coral Sunset and Loxahatchee Groves Elementary. Then-Schools Police Chief Jim Kelley said he considered scrapping the program but, without officers to keep a watchful eye, schools stood to lose valu- able equipment, he told The Palm Beach Post. An imme- diate response time convinced Kelly to keep them around.
“If it takes 20 minutes for a response, they’re gone,” Kelly said of thieves.
Still, by 2007, the district was down to seven Vandal Watch officers, including one officer moved to a prop- erty where a high school was planned but still hasn’t been built in suburban Lake Worth. Five of those remain occupied today, school district records reveal.
The costs of the program are difficult to pin down.
Kelly reported in 2001 that the Vandal Watch costs included $15,000 for each trailer and utility prep.
But Lopez owns his three-bedroom, two-bath home. A handwritten bill of sale shows he bought the trailer in 2005 from Leon, its owner. Lopez doesn’t pay for utilities, nor does he pay property taxes. He’s also not paid for answering alarm calls in the middle of the night — that’s part of the deal of living there.
Both Leon and Lopez said staying on campus delivered a welcome financial break that freed them to attend to family expenses.
But who is supposed to pay when they move?
D.D. Eisenhower, which sits in an unincorporated pocket just northeast of the Gardens Mall, was built in 1970 and renovated in 2007, leaving a one-story stretch of classrooms empty beside Lopez’s home. This spring, administrators began discussing plans to raze the long unused building and expand the school’s play- ing fields to include the spot where the home sits.
An April letter from Leon to Lopez simply states, “You will need to remove the trailer prior to the start of demolition” which is scheduled for the fall.
In a string of emails, Leon tells Lopez he should refer to his contract when it comes to who will pay. But Lopez never signed a contract.
Leon sold the trailer to Lopez as part of Leon’s jump to becoming Schools Police Chief in Sarasota, a job he kept until 2012 when he returned as police chief in Palm Beach County after Kelly’s retirement. In a final email on the matter, Leon writes, “Once I sold it to you and made the transfer and left the district it was Chief Kelly’s responsibility and everybody else to move forward on any contracts.”
This week, after repeated inquiries from The Post, district administrators concluded three of the five officers living in Vandal Watch trailers moved in without a contract. The question of who should pay to move them when the time comes has been sent to the legal department, said School District Chief of Staff Amity Schuyler.
Lopez never expected to move. He said the site plans for renovations that he saw always made room for his home, something he noted in his letter to the district.
Former Principal Pegg confirmed Lopez’s recollections in the email and in a conversation with The Palm Beach Post. “My recollection is the site plans did include a location for Alex’s house in the corner of the property ...”
“If I was still principal at Eisenhower I would want Alex to remain on site. I had zero late night calls in 10 years with Alex on site. He responded if there was a late night alarm, etc.,” said Pegg, who is the district’s director of charter schools. “He also assisted with afterhours events by providing School Police presence for no cost to the school.”