School’s Out, Skateboarders In

They come on weekends, or under cover of night, arriving in trucks or vans. Sometimes their mothers drop them off. They scale fences--bearing ladders, wire cutters and screwdrivers--and transform the grounds of a San Fernando Valley elementary school into a skateboarder paradise.

Magazine photos and word-of-mouth have turned Topeka Drive School into a mecca for young thrill seekers. But the school’s growing underground popularity is causing trouble.

“They move our lunch tables and build ramps,” Principal Jung Kim said. “They climb up on the roof of our portable classrooms and build more ramps. We had lunch tables on our roof one Monday morning. We really have to stop this.”

After another incursion last weekend, authorities said they are trying to stop the wheeled trespassers. Only a few have been caught. Los Angeles Unified School District officials said they have struggled for years to keep skateboarders off school campuses.

“Unfortunately, it’s a districtwide problem,” said school police Sgt. Jose Santome, who oversees campus security in the northwest San Fernando Valley. “It’s not just kids, it’s fully grown adults too. We get calls all the time saying there are skateboarders on the roof. I find it odd, but there must be some kind of thrill.”

Skaters say there are no skateboard parks nearby and so schools are an attractive alternative.

Echoing a cry heard from past generations of skaters, Shiloh Greenhouse, 25, of North Hollywood said, “Sad to say, skateboarding is like a crime now. I get tickets all the time. A lot of civic centers and schools sometimes give tickets, for $50 to $100.”

Greenhouse, a professional skateboarder who has skated at school campuses across Southern California, said, “It’s my job, I gotta do it.”

Topeka Drive administrators said they did not know their campus had become famous until a fifth-grader showed them the July 2000 issue of Transworld Skateboarding magazine.

“He brought in the magazine and said, ‘Look, Mr. Aparicio. This is our school,’ ” teacher Dave Aparicio recalled. The magazine featured three pages of advertisements photographed at Topeka Drive. One picture depicts a skateboarder jumping over a lunch table, with a caption reading: “What are you gonna learn today?”

The Northridge campus looks a lot like other suburban schools in California. But skateboarders say its block-long sprawl of concrete is perfect for practice moves, and its narrowly spaced portable classrooms invite acrobatic--and probably dangerous--roof-to-roof jumps.

School employees say they have returned after a weekend to find lunch tables and benches tilted along stairs and ledges to form ramps. Bicycle racks are upended and turned into ladders to reach classroom roofs. Repeated tricks have worn holes in the fiberglass benches and tables, ruining five lunch tables. Skateboarding stickers often are plastered like signatures along the eaves of buildings.

“If you were to come here at 5 in the morning and you saw what I saw, you’d understand,” said Manny Encinas, Topeka’s plant manager.

Donald Roth, who lives across the street, said he was astounded last year to see skateboarders hoist a bench over the fence. “They had it in the middle of the street and they were doing wheelies off the bench that they were using as a ramp,” Roth said. “I thought [a car] is going to make a fast turn, and they are going to cream them.”

The school has bolted down tables and benches. Storage buildings have been moved away from portable classrooms so they can’t be used to reach the roof.

Administrators have sent notices home asking parents not to let students skate on campus. Neighborhood Watch groups have been alerted and school police make regular rounds.

But the skaters keep coming.

In April, parent and teachers aide Keith Lobert was on campus when skateboarders arrived. He photographed them and called police. Four skaters were caught, but several got away.

Santome said some skaters travel far to reach the schools, drawn by the skateboard magazines.

“For whatever reason, certain schools make it into certain skateboarding publications,” he said. “I have personally cited people from Massachusetts on [district] property. They park their very expensive rental car right in

front of a no-parking sign and climb in. These are not just local kids.”

Transworld Skateboarding editor Joel Patterson said pro skaters put new sites on the map when they take photographers to shoot their stunts. Word quickly gets out, just like it did this time. “Police catch on to where you are skating so you are always moving, always trying to find the next thing,” he said.

Topeka will continue to draw skaters despite district measures because of its relative accessibility, he said, and “natural skateboarding environment.”

“Schools are ideal because there are eight hours every day you can’t skateboard. That means there are 16 hours every day that you can,” he said. “It becomes a learning institution of a whole different kind.”