Cleaning Up a Bad Act : Schools: Painters fight stubborn enemies as they work to cover graffiti that keeps appearing on campuses.

In the war against vandalism in San Diego city schools, painters Doug Musacco and Bill Adams cover every inch of the battlefield.

Their stubborn enemy: the gang graffiti that blights dozens of campuses.

Armed with rollers, brush and paint to match the color scheme at any school, the two men move from one site to another, day in and day out, erasing the always ugly, often violence-tainted names and slogans.

Sometimes taunted, sometimes thanked by students, Musacco and Adams earn the praise of teachers and administrators for their care for a school’s appearance.

Without their help, the environment at many campuses would inhibit, rather than enhance, learning.

“You try not to let it affect you,” Adams said, aware of the futility some would feel about having to return to some of the same schools week after week, repainting the same wall or bathroom. “We take pride in making the schools as clean as possible as soon as possible. It’s our job.”

“It’s a battle that’s got to be won,” schools Police Chief Alex Rascon insisted. “We can’t afford to leave graffiti around. It promotes violence, its message challenges other kids, it allows gangs to claim turf. It can’t remain at schools.”

Budget woes have forced cutbacks throughout the San Diego school district and put many maintenance projects on the back burner. But graffiti painting remains a high priority for the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system.

“You can argue there’s no positive use to spending money to paint over graffiti,” maintenance director Bruce Husson said. “But without it, we’d have real problems.”

Though the two painters have been called to schools from La Jolla to Paradise Hills, their most frequent calls come from schools in gang-infested areas in the city’s Southeast region. Those campuses have first call on district painters, especially when an individual custodian cannot cover enough of the graffiti temporarily with emergency supplies.

At Kennedy Elementary in Southeast San Diego, Musacco and Adams spent more than an hour Tuesday repainting the better part of a six-room building that vandals had trashed with racial hatred sprayed in bright yellow paint.

While custodian Anthony Herndon had done his best to mask the message, students had already seen the “Kill the White People” epithets, some of which covered the concrete sidewalk and would have to be steam-cleaned away by a separate maintenance crew.

“I try not to even read the stuff any more,” Musacco, a 16-year city schools veteran and a San Diego native, said. “Things get worse and worse in America’s so-called ‘Finest City,’ but if you let these people have the buildings (for graffiti), how are kids going to be able to learn?”

Despite the hot sun and punishing humidity, the painters patiently blended brown and white paint to match as closely as possible the school’s fading tan exterior. Without the matching, repeated cover-ups would eventually leave the exteriors of many schools resembling a worn quilt patched with contrasting colors.

The two men worked fast. Musacco deftly brushed trim while Adams applied paint with a roller, leaving nary a drip as they moved from wall to wall.

A couple of third-graders walked by the painters. One asked whether Adams could spruce up the drinking fountain, which had also been defaced with yellow spray. The second student grimaced and made an emphatic “thumbs down” when asked what he thought of graffiti.

Several sixth-graders, however, claimed the graffiti was by students from other schools and said they wanted to retaliate. Adams and Musacco could only shake their heads in dismay.

“We usually don’t get much of a hassle from elementary students,” said Adams, a district painter for seven years. “But sometimes at a junior high, kids will taunt us by saying, ‘Hey, we’ll be back later’ or ‘Hey, that’s my wall’ or ‘Hey, you’re messing with my neighborhood.’ ”

Adams said that graffiti often gives the painters a window into how schools become embroiled in the ugly world of gang and ethnic violence. At one high school, graffiti that threatened retribution sprouted the day after false rumors spread that a student had raped another student, he said.

The two men average about half a dozen schools a day, although they try to use the summer for larger projects, such as repainting entire stairwells, because fewer schools operate during July and August.

Earlier Tuesday, they had taken out new gang graffiti at Burbank Elementary--a perennial hot spot for problems in Barrio Logan--where a group had not only sprayed slogans outside the kindergarten room but their nicknames as well.

The men later drove their well-stocked panel van to nearby Emerson Elementary, where new graffiti had appeared overnight on two walls and a basketball backboard. Only the day before, Musacco and Adams had been at Emerson to repaint other walls that had been defaced over the weekend.

Later in the day, they would move on to Sequoia Elementary in Clairemont to eliminate graffiti outside the cafeteria and auditorium. If time permitted, they would try to clean the handball courts at Memorial Junior High, which Adams joked “serve as billboards” for gangs.

“Sure there are particularly bad schools around but there’s graffiti from time to time at schools all over the district,” Musacco said, noting that the team last week visited Vista Grande Elementary in Tierrasanta, one of San Diego’s more sedate campuses. And in the past, La Jolla, Mission Bay and Pt. Loma high schools have been hit by graffiti from gangs, Satan worshipers and skinhead groups, he said.

And while graffiti purveyors generally steer clear of writing over school murals painted as part of the district’s $3-million “Young-At-Art” program, the blue-and-green painting of a whale at Emerson--in honor of its marine science magnet--was severely damaged last February and had to be redone by special artists.