City Posts Reward in Vandalism of Valley School

Alarmed by a rash of vandalism at Los Angeles schools, the City Council offered a $5,000 reward Tuesday for information on the torching of two classrooms in North Hollywood.

Arson caused $50,000 in damage Sunday to Coldwater Canyon Elementary School.

“The classrooms were completely destroyed,” Assistant Vice Principal Burt Govenar said. “We are pretty much in disarray because of that.”

Vandals also sprayed fire extinguishers and wrote gang graffiti on the walls of the cafeteria and an office, he said.

The North Hollywood campus was vandalized twice before in recent months, Govenar said.

Last month, City Council members voted for a similar $5,000 reward after vandals broke into Erwin Street Elementary School in Van Nuys and spray-painted swastikas and the words “white power” on the walls.

Govenar said he is concerned that too few school police officers patrol on weekends.

Before and after school and on weekends, only five or six patrol cars, with two officers in each, are available to cover the district’s 900 campuses. On weekends, only one or two cars patrol the Valley’s 230 schools.

Aside from driving through campuses, the cars patrol problematic areas or respond to calls, said Gwenn Perez, chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District police force.

The 288-member force has not grown in size despite the addition of 90,000 students over the last 10 years.

Officers lost through attrition are not being replaced because of a hiring freeze, and a retirement package being offered is expected to reduce the force by another 10, Perez said.

“I know it’s not the time for the district to be adding officers,” she said. “But [students] can’t learn if [they] don’t have an environment that is safe. It’s devastating to come back and see your school destroyed or damaged.”

Although figures are still being tallied, incidents of vandalism are expected to be higher than last year, said Cira Zamora, a school district data analyst. In the 2000-01 school year, there were 1,779 reports of vandalism, down from 1,898 the previous year, school police said.

Zamora said vandalism has cost the district about $14 million the last three years.

With so few officers, Perez said, the only option is to rely more on schools to close gates, lock windows and doors and make equipment more recognizable as district property if it is stolen.

“It’s a very upsetting pattern,” Councilman Jack Weiss said. “These are serious acts of vandalism that strike fear into the hearts of the community, which wonders whether it is safe to send their little kids to these schools.”

Before the vote, Councilmen Dennis Zine and Alex Padilla called for a review by the council’s Public Safety Committee of cutbacks in the school police force.

“As I understand it, their deployment on weekends has been drastically reduced or eliminated in many parts of Los Angeles,” said Zine, a former police sergeant.

The LAPD already is taxed to the limit handling calls away from schools, Zine said, so the school district should reexamine its own budget cuts in campus patrols.

“It creates this climate where [vandals] can get away with this,” Zine said. “The cost to refurbish that school is going to be tremendous in lieu of the cost of deploying police officers to patrol those campuses, especially on the weekends.”