Vandalism Scars Van Nuys School

The classroom floors at Erwin Street School were ankle-deep Monday morning in the exercises of innocence: the ravaged work of children learning to spell, to color, to count.

It was a harsh lesson for the students of the normally serene elementary school. In what school officials called an extraordinarily malicious outbreak of vandalism, four classrooms at the Van Nuys school were scarred by graffiti “taggers” during the weekend--the children’s work was scattered, the walls splashed with paint.

“We teach them that if we can get along and start out with peace in kindergarten, then when they grow up they can have a peaceful world,” kindergarten teacher Tobi Rosen said, scanning the havoc wreaked on her classroom. “Some sick people took it upon themselves to do this.”

Rosen said the scariest part of the mess that greeted her when she arrived at 6:30 a.m. was a red swastika painted on a bookshelf.

“Maybe it’s just something gangs do, but it makes me uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s just a scary feeling.”

In addition to the swastika, the tags “MASE” and “VNC” were scrawled on windows, walls and chalkboards. On a film screen, the phrase “We are the best” was added after the tags.

Yellow and purple paint was poured onto the keyboard of the old upright piano in Rosen’s room. Black paint was dumped into her file drawer. American flags were used to swab paint around the floor of Rosen’s room and kindergarten teacher June Ikoma’s room next door.

In Ikoma’s room, paint ruined a VCR and glue damaged a typewriter. A fire extinguisher had been sprayed everywhere, including the aquarium, killing the pet fish.

“I was just ready to cry,” she said.

When parents began arriving with their children Monday morning, Rosen and Ikoma stopped them and suggested that the children be spared the sight of their classrooms a shambles. Many kindergartners were taken home. Others spent time with substitute teachers in the school’s library and auditorium while their teachers and parent volunteers tried to clean up the destruction.

The other two classrooms were less badly damaged, but those students also were displaced by the cleanup operation.

“I think it’s a disaster,” said Shawn Sgambellone, 9, as he helped scrape blue paint from the tile floor. “It makes you kind of mad.”

School police estimated the damage at $5,000. But school district spokeswoman Diana Munatones said the actual losses were immeasurable.

“At that age, you bond with your classroom,” she said. “It’s your home away from home. Students take great pride in the appearance of their room.”

Munatones said school police have not yet linked the tags to any group or gang and that the investigation was continuing. Although a window was broken in one classroom, she said, police found no signs of forcible entry to the others, indicating either that windows were left unlocked or that the vandals had a key.

“Our city’s dying day by day,” said Kris Rogers, parent of a second-grader whose classroom was among those vandalized.

She let her two children see the damage before she began scrubbing paint from the covers of a new series of social studies books.

“So many times being in a gang is played up as glamorous . . . and I wanted to show them the bad side,” she said. “Until we stand up as a group and say we’re tired of this, it won’t go away.”

Rosen and other teachers said the willingness of parents such as Rogers to pitch in was the only silver lining to the dark cloud of fear, anger and uncertainty the vandalism left.

Parents were left shaken too.

“You drop the kids off in the morning and you think they’re OK,” said Antoinette Marquez, who returned to help clean her daughter’s classroom.

Her daughter, Brittani, was upset by news that Rosen’s classroom had been trashed.

“I explained it to her and her response was, ‘Those guys need to be put in jail for the rest of their lives,’ ” Marquez said.

“Why did they do this?” she implored no one in particular, her arms opening wide to take in the damaged classroom. “This is a kindergarten class!”