During the winter, when the fields were quiet, Rick Leach would tag along on his father’s job as a security guard.

They were part-time jobs, supplements to the large sharecropping family's farming work.

But they left an impression, and led to Leach becoming a Holly Springs Police officer 15 years ago. His love of children led him to working in the schools.

When the Holly Springs Police Department created a school resources team, Leach was one of the first officers to sign up about five years ago.

These days you can spot the 44-year-old's smiling face at Holly Springs High School, directing traffic, watching over lunchroom activities or merely patrolling the halls.

It’s serious business, but he usually does it with a smile on his face — besides, it’s easier than what he grew up doing.

"It was hard work," Leach said on a recent weekday, remembering back to the cotton and tobacco that he picked with his 11 brothers and sisters in the New Hill community.

It was a house full of love though, and a house that imparted values, many of them from his beloved father Ezzi Parker Leach, who passed away at 80 just a few months ago.

Leach's mother, Annie Ruth Leach, 83, still lives in New Hill.

"I think it gave me a lot of good work qualities," Leach said of his childhood home.

After Leach graduated from Apex High School he worked at various places, such as at a shipping facility, but he wanted the job he had always dreamed of and a job where he wouldn’t get laid off. So he went through a law-enforcement training program at Wake Technical Community College and became a police officer.

Not that his work is easy. Dealing with teenagers every day, though rewarding, can be challenging as well.

It was midday and as one of the first lunch crowds sauntered into the lunchroom — right beside Leach’s office — an ominous roar began to emanate beneath the usual laughs and yells.

Leach looked a little concerned and even before a voice from his walkie-talkie said, "We've got a situation in the lunchroom," Leach was out the door saying, "Let me take a peep out there."

He came back smiling.

A bunch of kids were "spitting," he says, explaining that the word is a slang term for a rap battle where two kids try to outdo each other’s rhymes. The roaring crowd was egging them on.

Slang is just one of the things Leach learns by being around teenagers day in and day out. He has also learned to be patient and gentle with the kids when he has to. Being loud and tough doesn’t always solve the problem with teens, even though when he first started the job he would say to himself, "Man these children are off the chain."