Ellen Cameron
Staff Writer

You can’t find it. Is it in your locker? Your car? Did you leave it at home? You search, hoping you’ll find it, because even though you know it was just there, you hope you’re just delusional, because “temporarily misplaced” is a lot easier to deal with than “stolen”.

The Sidekick staff member Wren Culp knows the feeling all too well. He didn’t have time to take his backpack to his locker before fifth period, so he left it outside C108, his Latin class. When he went to retrieve his backpack and found the backpack itself in another A-Hall, its contents stolen.

“I’d heard of people getting robbed,” Culp said. “Some CHS graduates said that was one of the problems at school, but I haven’t known anyone else personally [who was robbed].You see other backpacks in the halls, and assume they’re not going to get yours, they’re going to get someone else’s: it’s a bad assumption.”

Culp, a sophomore, was lucky enough to have both his iPod and graphing calculator returned to him thanks to the work of student resource officers, but many aren’t so fortunate. While theft is a fairly typical problem in high schools, the number of thefts at CHS this year is unusual.

“It’s always been an ongoing problem,” student resource officer Craig Parrish said. “However, certain times of the year are busier.”

This year, there have been as many as three thefts a day, a thefts are still increasing, as they tend to do as the holidays approach. According to the officers, 95 percent of the thefts are from unlocked lockers in the athletics locker rooms and backpacks in the hallways or cubbies at the library. It’s very rare that secured lockers are broken into.

Cell phones, iPods and cash are the items taken most often, though purses, keys, wallets and calculators are also occasionally stolen. The police have been able to use video surveillance footage to recover about half of all stolen items, but sometimes, missing items are gone for good.

The police have caught approximately a dozen different perpetrators since the school year began, and the warning stands to all prospective robbers, that the consequences are severe.

“Normally, once caught, two things happen to the student depending on the value of property,” associate principal Michael Williams said. “[The student] is looking at suspension in or out of school of DAEP placement and written citation charges that determine if Coppell police are involved.”

The punishment is far from pretty. Even students who are not sentenced to jail time face time at Compass, an alternative education school that has misbehaving students that serves CHS.

“The worst part of my punishment was life at Compass,” an anonymous CHS student who was sent to Compass for theft said. “They were really basic classes. The kids weren’t stupid, but they weren’t my caliber, and I just sat there and did nothing.”

Now reformed and back at CHS, the anonymous student has a word of advice for the petty thieves who currently plague the halls of Coppell High.

“Don’t do it,” anonymous said. “You’ll get caught, and there are consequences.”

Meanwhile, though students don’t ask to be victims of theft, they could do more to prevent their things from becoming good prospective targets.

For example, senior Aleya Noor lost both a designer jacket and a TI-83 calculator in two separate instances of petty theft last year.

“I left my calculator on my desk overnight,” Noor said. “I just forgot to grab it at the end of class. I asked my physics teachers to ask his classes if anyone had seen it, but I never got it back.”

While moments of forgetfulness made Noor vulnerable to theft, many students simply do not take precautionary measures.

“Keep valuables to a minimum and secure them,” Parrish said .

For more information about the possibility of theft or to report an incident, see the campus police. Anonymous tips can also be called in to Campus Crime Stoppers at (214) 335 – 3404.