Classrooms Hit Nearly Every Night by Vandals : Crime: The cost to Valley schools was $1.5 million last year. Officials are trying to bring the issue home to students.

As summer settles over Colfax Avenue School, the sounds of children playing have been replaced by the echoes of hammers and the hum of an electric paint sprayer.

A month after vandals trashed 17 rooms at the North Hollywood school and caused $37,000 in damage, an army of parents, students and teachers has converged to refurbish wrecked classrooms.

“When school reopens in August, things will be pretty much as they were,” Colfax administrator Donnie McNeal said hopefully.

Across the San Fernando Valley at Mt. Gleason Junior High School in Sunland, where thieves set fire to a teachers lounge in an attempt to hide a burglary, the damage will take longer to repair.

Nearly 11,000 books in the adjacent library were destroyed by smoke, soot and water. It may be three years before the library is rebuilt, and even longer than that until the books, films and other materials ruined as a result of the fire can be replaced.

“Everything is gone,” librarian Leona Cook said. “It’s like visiting the morgue.”

The severity of the two incidents--which happened within days of each other--prompted East Valley school board member Roberta Weintraub to call 1991 the “worst year ever” for vandalism and theft in the Valley.

But Los Angeles Unified School District officials said that although the break-ins at Colfax and Mt. Gleason were notably severe, they are, unfortunately, not unusual. Vandals and thieves strike almost every night at schools around the Valley--sometimes just to damage a few classrooms, other times to cart off equipment.

Schools are a favorite target of vandals and burglars, in part because of the relative ease with which they can be broken into and the availability of portable and easily sold items such as televisions, typewriters and, more recently, computers and video equipment.

“Even though we go to great lengths to secure equipment, we are securing equipment that is small and portable,” school district Police Chief Wesley Mitchell said. “It’s very handy for someone who needs quick money.”

Last year, vandalism and theft cost the district more than $6 million; roughly $1.5 million went to repair or replace damaged or stolen items at the 200 or so school facilities in the Valley, officials said.

A fraction of that cost is offset by parents who can be held liable for the damage their children cause, but most vandals are never caught. Even when they are, the district often has to sue parents for restitution. About half of the 230 vandals apprehended during the 1989-90 school year agreed to pay for the damage they caused.

Districtwide, school police said, there were 1,093 burglaries and 972 incidents of vandalism in the 1989-90 school year. But Assistant Chief Larry Hutchens said the vandalism figure is deceptively low because relatively minor incidents such as broken windows often go unreported to police. For instance, district crews replaced 44,256 windows broken by vandals in the 1989-90 school year.

Vandalism has remained relatively stable for most of the last decade, after sharp increases in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But it remains such a problem that district officials created an elementary school program to discourage vandalism.

“We try to make youngsters interested in preserving their schools rather than destroying them,” said Herbert Graham, school police director. He added that more resources need to be devoted to educational programs to prevent vandalism and theft so that fewer resources will be expended on cleaning up the mess and chasing suspects.

Earl Persley and Bob Aguirre travel around the district, using films and puppets to explain the deleterious effects of vandalism by comparing school property to the students’ personal belongings and by coordinating the presentations with classroom activities such as poster and essay contests.

“We make them aware of where the money comes from,” Persley said. “We tell them that their parents pay for their education through taxes and that when people vandalize their schools, they themselves end up paying for it.”

Buren Simmons, who oversees Aguirre and Persley, said: “The message basically is to let them know that they need to be responsible at their age for the things they understand, that materials at the school belong to them and the other students. We try to show them that it’s important to take care of the property we share and the property of others.”

During the 45-minute presentation, children are encouraged to share their feelings about past vandalism at their schools, an activity that sometimes becomes emotional as the students remember spoiled projects and overturned desks.

“They’re very sad,” Persley said. “They take it very personally. These kids are very proud of the work they do and when someone comes in and destroys it, that hurts them very badly.”

Despite the educational efforts, a district maintenance unit trained to clean up after vandals and thieves is so busy that its primary duty of washing upper-floor windows is perpetually behind schedule.

Crews from the 30-member unit respond only to serious incidents or where there are hazardous materials--such as paint or the foam from fire extinguishers--to clean up. In May, the unit was called to 53 schools--13 of them in the Valley. Minimum time for each call was estimated at eight hours for a two-member crew.

Thomas Meisenheimer, who oversees the unit, said his crews routinely see destruction like that at Colfax, and although they have become accustomed to it, every new call is depressing. “You wonder how a child can have so much hate,” he said. “I’ve got kids of my own and I can feel for a parent with a child with so much hate at that age.”

One suburban school district has gone so far as to hire private security guards to protect its facilities.

In the Antelope Valley Union High School District, vandalism and theft dropped sharply after the guards began to patrol the district’s six campuses on nights and weekends. Darlene Hinkel, assistant superintendent of business services, said that during the 1989-90 school year, vandalism and theft cost the district about $100,000.

This year, that cost was under $10,000, but the patrols themselves cost $150,000. Hinkel said school officials decided to spend the money to prevent future costs and to create a sense of security on campus.

“We’re not actually saving any money right now, but we are saving frustration,” she said.

For schools in cash-strapped Los Angeles, such a measure is only a dream. The district includes more than 800 schools and other facilities spread out over 700 square miles. To post a guard at each facility would be impossible financially, officials said.

Because of budgetary restraints, school police are constantly playing catch-up with vandals and thieves. The district police force operates on a $24-million budget and includes 305 sworn-officer positions. The department’s budget was not reduced by district officials in the latest round of cost cutting.

Even so, on some nights only one patrol car cruises the Valley.

And, fewer than 40% of classrooms in the district are equipped with alarms, meaning that break-ins sometimes are not discovered until teachers return the next morning or after the weekend. By that time, the tracks of intruders often are cold.

Increasing the number of classrooms equipped with alarms would be an “extreme expense” and probably would do little to reduce the cost of vandalism unless additional patrols were added, Hutchens said. He explained that alarms alert officers when a break-in occurs, but by the time a patrol car arrives, the damage may already be done and the vandals gone.

If school police cars are too far from an alarm, they can radio for assistance from other law enforcement agencies, but those officers do not have keys for school facilities and often are unfamiliar with the layout once they arrive.

Mitchell said he would like to improve fences at many schools and add lighting to discourage intruders.

Instead of trying to head off every incident, school police officers concentrate on tracking the patterns of habitual vandals and burglars. Portable alarm systems can be wired at schools that officers believe are likely to be hit by repeat offenders, and investigators frequently do stakeouts.

“It’s the only way we can do it with the resources we have,” Hutchens said. “The habitual ones are the ones we can track. You can’t predict the random ones.”

And most incidents of vandalism are random, hatched on the playground after school when someone decides it might be fun to bust up the classroom in which he or she recently failed a test. In the case of Colfax, the three youths believed to be responsible were former students, and one of them felt he had been treated unfairly by teachers, according to Los Angeles police.

“Sometimes it will just happen,” Aguirre said.

Younger children are apt to splatter paint around the classroom or turn over desks but are less likely to destroy or steal expensive equipment such as computers and television sets. If they take anything at all, Mitchell said, younger children might steal a box of crayons or a magic marker, almost as an afterthought.

“These kids are just after mischief and excitement,” he said.

As intruders get older, the damage they leave behind can be far more devastating, even though vandalism often is a secondary reason for the break-in. Mitchell and others said older intruders are more likely to break into a school to steal, but then may trash the classroom to cover their tracks and confuse investigators.

That seems to have been the case at Mt. Gleason, police say. Investigators speculate that burglars set the teachers lounge ablaze to cover a series of break-ins that took place over several days. The fire caused as much as $500,000 in damage, and three men are awaiting trial for the crime.

But their arrests do little to replace the 10,800 books destroyed in the library fire. Librarian Cook and Principal Tom Rayburn said the rebuilding will be slow. Plans are in the works for a book drive, and the library will be temporarily housed in another room. But school officials are uncertain of what students will do when they return in the fall without the books and materials they need for research projects and class assignments.

“It’s a big blow when you see something you’ve been intimately involved with and then, boom, it’s gone,” Rayburn said.

“It’s like taking away our arms or legs in terms of important parts of our school.”