PLACENTIA / YORBA LINDA : Tougher Stance on Graffiti Proposed

After spending more than $169,000 this school year to obliterate graffiti on campuses, the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District plans to adopt a hard-line approach to the problem.

A district task force on graffiti presented a list of suggestions to the Board of Trustees this week that includes pushing for a ban on marking pens and highlighter pens, as well as suspending the ability to obtain a driver’s license for teens convicted of vandalism.

The task force also recommended that the district’s policy on vandalism be rewritten to specifically include graffiti and that the district work to consistently enforce the policy.

According to Kim Stallings, assistant superintendent for administrative services, the district will not be reimbursed by its insurance company for money spent so far on graffiti cleanup. The district has a $25,000 deductible per incident, and the policy prohibits the district from grouping together each occurrence of graffiti to meet that deductible.

The district could purchase insurance that would lower its deductible, Stallings said, but the premiums would be much higher.

“We need to practice more aggressive risk management and to take a lot more steps to contain costs,” he said. “If we still can’t contain costs, we might have to buy more expensive insurance.”

Some of those steps include establishing a hot line for the reporting of graffiti and purchasing surveillance equipment for each school, both of which were recommended by the task force.

The Brea Police Department, which provides service for Yorba Linda, is also considering adopting a program at a district school that uses student labor to clean up graffiti at the school. The theory behind the program, which is being used at a school in Brea, is that students who clean up graffiti become less tolerant of their classmates, siblings and friends who vandalize.

“Graffiti is not just our problem,” Police Lt. Bill Lentini told the Yorba Linda City Council earlier this month. “We made the student council (of the Brea school) responsible for cleaning up graffiti. After three weekends of cleanup, they started looking for the culprits. We haven’t had any other incidents there.”