School Turned Upside Down

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 quiet campus into a skateboarder paradise.

Lured by word of mouth and magazine photos, skateboarders have sneaked onto the Topeka Drive School campus in Northridge several times in recent months, causing minor damage and prompting concern among teachers, parents and neighbors.

“They move our [outdoor] lunch tables, and build ramps,” Principal Jung Kim said this week.

“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 but have cited only a few because they have proven so elusive. District officials say they have struggled to keep skateboarders off school campuses for years with little success.

“Unfortunately, it’s a districtwide problem,” said Los Angeles Unified School District 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.”

Citing a lack of skateboard parks in the area, enthusiasts say schools are an attractive, plentiful alternative, and they decry crackdown efforts.

“Sad to say, skateboarding is like a crime now,” said Shiloh Greenhouse, 25, of North Hollywood, a professional skateboarder who has plied his trade on numerous Southern California school campuses.

“I get tickets all the time. A lot of civic centers and schools sometimes give tickets, for $50 to $100. But it’s my job; I gotta do it.”

Topeka Drive administrators said they did not recognize the extent of the school’s reputation until a fifth-grader turned up in school a few months ago with 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 shows a skateboarder jumping over a lunch table, with a caption reading “What are you gonna learn today?”

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Nestled in a quiet Northridge neighborhood, the school looks like a lot of suburban schools in California.

Skateboarders, however, say its block-long, uninterrupted sprawl of concrete is perfect for practicing moves, and its narrowly spaced portable classrooms invite acrobatic rooftop-to-rooftop jumps.

School employees say they have returned after a weekend to find lunch tables and benches tilted along stairs and ledges to form ramps, or bicycle racks upended to provide access to classroom roofs.

Repeated tricks have worn holes in the fiberglass benches and tables, ruining five lunch tables. And skateboarding stickers are often 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,” Manny Encinas, Topeka’s plant manager, said Monday. “I get here and it’s like, ‘What did they do now?’ ”

Donald Roth, who lives across the street, said he was astounded last year to see a group of 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 passing motorist] is going to make a fast turn, and they are going to cream them.”

The school and the district have taken steps to stop skateboarders, such as bolting down tables and benches and moving storage buildings away from portable classrooms, so they cannot be used as makeshift ladders.

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

In March, the Topeka Parent and Faculty Organization wrote a letter to school board member Valerie Fields begging for help.

But the skaters keep coming, later and later at night, carrying ladders and tools.

“I find wrenches, hammers, screws,” Encinas said. “Sometimes they leave their [skateboard] wax.”

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

Santome said skateboarders have come to Los Angeles campuses from great distances, drawn by items in skateboard magazines.

“For whatever reason, certain schools make it into certain skateboarding publications,” the sergeant said. “I have personally cited people from Massachusetts on LAUSD 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.”

At Topeka Drive, a fifth-grader with spiked hair and an earring said Monday he had seen the rooftop skateboarders on a recent weekend.

“I came and this guy brought a ladder and he took this trash can and climbed up on the roof,” said Cory Driskill, pointing to the bi-level cafeteria roof. “He climbed up and did an olly. He was not scared or anything. Then he came off and did a New Zealand 360. . . . It was really cool.”

Patterson said that despite security efforts, campuses like Topeka will continue to be a draw because of their relative accessibility 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.”