Picking Up the Pieces : Education: Vandals have plagued San Pedro High for several weeks. After the latest incident, in which eight classrooms were damaged, the school and its students are fighting back.

Just back from pregnancy leave, English teacher Mary Anne Tippin was finally ready to return to her classroom at San Pedro High School. Then a greeting from a colleague made her heart sink.

“You’d be better off turning around and going home,” she was told.

Broken glass and the contents of her desk and several file cabinets covered the floor. Pictures of her children were stuffed into books that had been sprinkled with bathroom cleanser, and a vulgar message was scribbled on the chalkboard.

“You feel violated,” said Tippin, who said she broke into tears at the sight. “I kept telling myself it wasn’t personal, and yet, on a deep level, you do feel that way. My first reaction was (that the vandals) must have a terrible hatred of adults and authority figures.”

The scene, which was similar in seven other classrooms at the school, has become all too familiar at San Pedro High, which since January has been struck twice by vandals and once by an arsonist.

School officials, teachers and students all agree that the most recent incident, which occurred sometime over the Feb. 21 weekend and destroyed nearly $2,000 worth of equipment and teaching materials, was the last straw.

To express their outrage, the faculty association has offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. School administrators are also considering hiring a private security company to wire the school’s three main buildings with silent alarms.

Even students are taking a stand: An anti-vandalism rally is being planned and several dozen students will be passing out leaflets Monday afternoon to urge neighbors to be more watchful of their campus.

“I don’t understand what these people get out of doing this,” senior class President Joe Buscaino, 17, said this week as he surveyed photos of the damage. “They just ruin it for everyone who cares about their school, for people who want to do something with their lives.”

About 2,250 10th- through 12th-graders attend San Pedro High, which was founded in 1903 and houses a marine science magnet program on its 23-acre campus.

The school, a sprawling collection of buildings perched on a hill with a view of the South Bay, serves a stable but diverse population of students, often from families that have lived in San Pedro for four or five generations, Principal Joseph D. Viola said.

In the past couple of years the school has been plagued by graffiti, most of it perpetuated by neighborhood gangs or spray-paint artists, Viola said.

“It’s been an ongoing thing,” Viola said. “We try to keep the school clean and immediately clean (the graffiti) off because that seems to discourage it if we don’t leave it up there.”

Viola said he is puzzled by the severity of the recent spate of vandalism.

In mid-January, burglars made off with six videocassette recorders that had been used as teaching aids by the English department. On Jan. 27, an arson fire gutted a bungalow that housed a driver’s education class.

And on Feb. 24, eight teachers, most of them from a wing that houses the English and social studies departments, returned to school to find that someone had ransacked their classrooms, toppling desks, emptying file cabinets and tearing down bulletin boards. In some instances, vandals had sprayed the debris with fire extinguishers.

One social studies teacher lost dozens of irreplaceable videotapes and World War II memorabilia that he had spent his teaching career assembling. Another teacher was so distraught by the condition of her classroom that she decided to take pregnancy leave two weeks early.

Although district officials describe the destruction at San Pedro High last month as unusually severe, vandalism is far from unique to schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Last year, the district spent about $4 million to clean up graffiti and repair or replace equipment and materials damaged by vandals. District officials say there are signs that the problem is increasing.

“Traditionally, when times are economically difficult, as in a recession, without exception there has been an increase in vandalism not just in schools but on all public properties,” Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias said. “People get desperate.”

San Pedro High administrators say it is unlikely that they will find those responsible for last month’s attack. Los Angeles Police Department detectives who surveyed the damage said it appears that the vandals are not San Pedro High students, but they may be gang members from other communities.

“You never know until you catch the culprits,” Assistant Principal Rey Mayoral said. “But some of the graffiti we found are from areas that do not include San Pedro or the kids we bus in.”

Richard Browning, senior high school division administrator for the district, said most of the district’s vandalism problems can be traced to “a small group of kids who are disgruntled.”

“Sometimes it is aimed at some particular teacher or administrator in the school,” Browning said. “But other times it is just kids with pent-up hostility who are looking to vent it in this manner, or maybe it is an adventure, a risk for them.”

Although budget shortfalls and funding cutbacks make the loss of materials through vandalism particularly painful, in some ways the greatest toll is psychological, administrators said.

“When (teachers and students) come in in the morning and see the physical acts of vandalism, it is a shock,” Zacarias said. “It’s a very traumatic feeling. And often . . . some of the (instructional materials) just can’t be replaced overnight.”

Rick Matthews, a French teacher and union representative at San Pedro High, agreed.

“It’s a terrible blow to everybody, even if it’s not your room,” Matthews said. “To have all your work there and valuable tools of the trade and then things are destroyed . . . it’s extraordinarily demoralizing.”