Pranksters glue high school doors shut

Forget being glued to their seats: Students at a San Diego County high school couldn’t even get through their classroom doors Friday.

With only a day to go before spring break, vandals plugged the locks on all the exterior gates and doors on campus with super-strength adhesive.

“A teacher who always gets there early called me on my cellphone and said, ‘Guess what?’ ” said Carlsbad High School Principal Margaret Stanchi. “But I didn’t guess this.”

About 100 doors were sealed shut sometime before the first staff members arrived about 6:30 a.m. -- a feat that may not have taken very long to pull off, Stanchi said.

“The locks are so small that all they’d have needed to do was put the point of the tube in and squeeze a little,” she said. “It doesn’t take much to stop you from putting your key in the lock.”

The custodial staff quickly unsealed the lock on a building with 27 classrooms, but the rest of the school’s 3,000 students were sent to sit in gym bleachers until their classrooms were opened, one by one. Students were shepherded around in a kind of reverse fire drill, Stanchi said.

The grayish glue in most of the locks was pliant enough for workers to remove it with a metal pick, but in some cases they resorted to using a chemical solvent, Stanchi said.

Surveillance video taken at the school failed to provide any clues to the identity of the pranksters, Stanchi said. Carlsbad police were investigating.