Picking up

WILLOW — Volunteer clean-up crews and donations of equipment are helping staff at Willow Elementary School cope in the wake of about $150,000 in damage allegedly caused by two teenage vandals on Saturday afternoon.

With a Borough-wide inservice day Monday, teachers from Talkeetna, Trapper Creek and as far away as Colony High School came to Willow to pitch in with the cleanup so classes could resume today.

Principal Alberta Nordberg said the first order of business this morning would be an assembly.

“As soon as [students] get off the bus they’re going straight to the gym,” Nordberg said.

At the assembly, she will let kids know what to expect when they enter their classrooms and assure them the building is safe. She will warn them about the possibility that, despite the best efforts of janitors and staff, there might still be errant shards of broken glass in the classrooms.

“If you see something like that tell an adult, don’t try to pick it up yourself,” Nordberg said she would instruct the children.

Classrooms took first priority during the cleanup. Although monitors were thrown to the floor and some broken, Nordberg said all but four computers in the computer lab are operational.

The two vandal suspects, a 13- and 14-year-old, each former Willow Elementary students, wreaked havoc in the school, including paint splattered on classroom walls, ketchup and mustard smeared in the hallway, electronics thrown to the floor and no plate in the teacher’s lounge left intact.

Nordberg said few rooms were left untouched by the extensive vandalism as all but five classrooms were broken into. Computer monitors in the computer lab were thrown to the floor. Filing cabinets were up-ended, spilling permanent records.

In Nordberg’s office, cooking oil was poured on her desk. In the library, the vandals up-ended bookshelves, some of which will have to be replaced. They also tossed computers to the floor there as well.

“One of the printers that was right as you go in the library door that’s sitting on the counter, it must have been in 1,000 pieces,” Nordberg said.

Nordberg said she’s been heartened by the outpouring of support. By Monday she’d had a call from state Rep. Mark Neuman, R-Mat-Su, offering his help. A private company donated a fax machine to replaced one smashed in the break-in.

A teacher coming in to work on his off hours Saturday first discovered the damage, Nordberg said.

“All of a sudden he heard two male voices say, ‘There’s somebody in the building. We’ve got to get out of here,’” Nordberg said Monday during a break from the clean-up effort.

The two kids bolted, she said, but Alaska State Troopers, having noticed shoe prints in a puddle of blue paint in one of the classrooms, were quickly able to locate them, she said.

“They started doing a door-to-door search of the houses behind the school,” Nordberg said. “Sure enough, there were a couple of kids with blue paint on their shoes.”

Troopers have not released the names of the two boys, nor has the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District.

Troopers said charges of burglary, criminal mischief and terroristic threatening — for a bomb threat scrawled in marker on a hallway wall — will be forwarded to juvenile justice. The two teens were released to their parents, according to a trooper report.

“They told the troopers they were bored and didn’t have anything else better to do,” Nordberg said.

She said they used fire extinguishers to smash windows in classroom doors and got in that way. They also sprayed all nine of the school’s fire extinguishers around the school. As to how the teens got into the building in the first place, Nordberg said they used a screwdriver or pry bar to jimmy open an outside door.

Nordberg said she knows the boys and hopes they’ll be forgiven.

“They’re not hopeless. Their behavior is not hopeless. We can get these kids turned around,” she said.

Community members have asked why those teens have not been made to help clean the school up, the principal said. She said everyone, including adults, needs time to cool off and having any suspects in the school at this time wouldn’t be a good idea.

“I don’t want those kids in there cleaning it up because I don’t want an adult to have the opportunity to be angry at those kids,” Nordberg said.

Nordberg noted the irony of the timing of the vandalism; the school was due to have all its doors wired to an alarm system in May. Had the vandals tried breaking in then, she said they likely would have been scared off.

“Guardian Security had come out last Wednesday and I had walked through with them,” she said Monday. “They were going to put alarms on every single one of the doors.”

Catherine Esary, school district spokeswoman, said in the coming weeks the district will have to examine ways to come up with a plan to pay for the damage. Superintendent George Troxel, she said, will likely present some alternatives at Wednesday’s school board meeting. Also on the agenda is a $9 million bond for school security upgrades.

“Situations like Willow highlight the need for heightened security or more comprehensive security,” she said.

Nordberg agreed. She said last fall the school was broken into and vandalized, though not nearly to the degree it was this past weekend. The first thing troopers asked, she said, was whether the school was equipped with video cameras. She said it isn’t. But it will be if the bond passes in the general election.

“We still don’t know who did that one,” Nordberg said of last year’s vandalism.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiers-man.com or 352-2270.