Willow still tallying costs of vandalism

WILLOW — Willow Elementary School Principal Alberta Nordberg sat at her desk last week watching the price tag from the school’s recent vandalism creep higher and higher. Filling out a Victim’s Impact Statement, Nordberg was slowly getting numbers together for the Division of Juvenile Justice, which is interested in knowing how much monetary damage a pair of teens accused of vandalizing the school allegedly caused.

As bills for expensive technology and cleaning services pass across her desk, Nordberg still has a sunny outlook for the future.

“The school is cleaned beautifully,” Nordberg said, adding that there is a sense of forgiveness for the suspects, students ages 13 and 14. Nordberg said one boy is driven to Mat-Su Day School to attend classes.

“We’re more concerned about getting these boys on the right track,” she said.

That doesn’t meaning things are totally back to normal at Willow Elementary.

Insurance will cover some of the cleanup costs, district spokeswoman Catherine Esary said, but there is a deductible. Other money could come in the form of restitution the school will request, something Nordberg said she’s sure will happen.

Although a preliminary estimate following the April 12 incident put damage at about $150,000, school district officials are still unsure of how close that number is to the actual damage and cleanup costs.

Nordberg said now that the major destruction is largely cleared from the building, staff are starting to find smaller things like bits of glass on top of books and fire extinguisher residue in air registers.

The school received good news recently when EHS-Alaska, an Eagle River company specializing in removing hazardous chemical and physical agents from the workplace, deemed the air inside the school safe to breathe, Nordberg said. The report is expected to calm the fears of some parents worried that particles from fire extinguishers discharged during the vandalism would be harmful to children.

The report found samples of dust particles measured more than 19 times less than the Occupational Safety and Health Administration deems hazardous.

“The airborne dust concentrations in the school on April 16 were far less than the OSHA permissible exposure limits,” the EHS report says.

Now the school moves on to tallying the damage.

A large part of the expense will come in the form of a bill from NANA Management Services, the company contracted to clean the school, Nordberg said. Also, replacing computers and new, high-tech teaching tools called Promethean Boards — white boards hooked to computers making a digital classroom — will run the costs higher.

Each Promethean Board costs $4,180, she said. Five were destroyed.

Now, Nordberg will work with other departments in the school district to help with the tally of damage, separating destroyed items into categories then adding them together. In the meantime, with every shard of glass picked out of books and surface rubbed clean, Willow Elementary gets closer to the way it was.

“It’s the small stuff,” Nordberg said.

Contact Frontiersman reporter Michael Rovito at 352-2252 or michael.rovito@frontiersman.com.