Free Rent for Mobile Home Families, Savings for Districts : Live-In School Monitors Help Curb Vandalism

When David Martz, 31, was invited to park his mobile home at Sunset Lane Elementary School in Fullerton, he decided he couldn’t do much better for himself, his wife and two children.

After all, he now lives in a quiet neighborhood and has a nine-acre yard with jungle gyms, a soccer field and baseball diamond just outside his front door.

“It’s a great deal for us,” said Martz, an environmental technician who works part time as a basketball coach at Kennedy High School in La Palma. “We’ve always rented and now we have our own home.” And he lives there rent-free. Even his utilities are paid.

Martz is one of a growing number of mobile home owners who live on school campuses in Orange County in exchange for keeping an eye on school grounds at night, on weekends and on holidays. The program is part of an expanding effort by money-short school districts to control vandalism and thefts.

Working in Orange County

In Orange County, the program is operating in Fullerton, Cypress, Anaheim, Ocean View, Westminster, Santa Ana and Newport Mesa school districts, and most district administrators say that the program is working well.

In Los Angeles County, Rowland Heights Unified School District, which also covers part of West Covina and La Puente, has mobile homes on three of its 21 school sites. But Richard Green, police chief of the Los Angeles School District, said he sees little hope of establishing a more widespread program in his district, the largest in the state.

“We’ve experimented with it but the program didn’t work well for us, especially in schools in the metropolitan area,” he said. “It might work in smaller communities, but I think the Neighborhood Watch program is the best thing we have going.”

Orange County school districts are resorting to the trailer residents to guard against vandals who break windows, set fires, paint graffiti and generally deface the exteriors of buildings, even though they also employ modern security devices, such as electronic monitoring systems that spot intruders inside buildings.

Cypress, Anaheim Adopt Plan

Cypress Elementary School District, with seven schools, and Anaheim Union High School District, with 19, have guard trailers at each of their schools.

“In 1979 we had $39,213 in vandalism,” said Bob Murphy, Anaheim’s director of maintenance and operation. But in 1984, with the school district using an expanded number of the live-in monitors, “We only had $8,191 in losses,” he said.

Cypress School Superintendent William Calton said the program has reduced crime by as much as 40%.

One of the problems was arson. “We could see it would not have happened if we had people on campus,” he said.

Officers More Effective

But Ray Allison, manager of police services for the Santa Ana School District, feels that uniformed officers on 24-hour watch make for more effective enforcement.

“We had four (mobile homes) in 1981,” Allison said, “but the district still had $180,000 in damage that year. In 1984 with only one trailer--but with uniformed police--it dropped to $27,000.”

Alex Rascon, president of the California School Police Officer Assn. and police chief of the San Diego School Police Department, shared Allison’s sentiments. While the trailer program might work in suburban areas, he said, chances for success in urban settings are limited.

“You need a nice, cozy school site with not much activity to make it work,” said Rascon, who noted that an attempt to develop the program in San Diego, the state’s second-largest school district, failed to materialize.

“We couldn’t find many volunteers, especially for high school campuses,” he said. “One guy we interviewed said he would need a guard dog and an electrified 10-foot fence around his trailer before he would take the job.”