Vandals Take $8,000 Sound System From Sylmar School : Thefts: The break-in has angered Olive Vista Junior High students. The present and previous classes sold 18,000 candy bars to buy the speakers.

Burglars vandalized Olive Vista Junior High School this week and stole an $8,000 sound system that students had purchased with funds they raised by selling candy. It was the latest in a series of break-ins by thieves and vandals at San Fernando Valley schools.

When students and teachers arrived at the school at Tyler Street and Borden Avenue in Sylmar Wednesday morning, they found television sets, telephones and tape recorders stolen, Assistant Principal John McLaughlin said.

The vandals also sprayed fire extinguishers, wrote obscenities on several walls, knocked over desks and damaged or stole students’ personal property, he said.

Students were upset the most by the theft of the sound system, used at campus assemblies and student dances, McLaughlin said.

About 500 students raised the money for the system in the 1989-90 school year by selling 18,000 candy bars in less than a month, he said.

“For years, the school had wanted one,” McLaughlin said.

Students would hook the six-foot speakers to the radio at lunchtime each day, or connect it to record turntables for dances.

“All of us are mad,” said Erika Guerrero, 15, a ninth-grader from Sylmar. “We paid for that with money we raised--it isn’t fair to us.”

Guerrero, who is graduating from Olive Vista next week, said students were sad during their awards banquet Wednesday because there was no sound system.

“It hurts the school, but it hurts the students more because it’s our graduation,” she said. “We sold a lot of candy to pay for that thing and now it’s gone.”

The assault was the latest in a series of attacks within the past month on Valley schools, including a burglary and fire at Mt. Gleason Junior High School in Tujunga, and a break-in by vandals who caused $37,000 in damage at Colfax Avenue Elementary School in North Hollywood.

Students at North Hollywood High School donated $355 to the Colfax Avenue school Friday and signed up to help repaint it June 20, Colfax Principal Elisabeth Norton-Douglass said.