School Vandals Do $27,000 in Damage : Crime: They smash computers, splatter paint, break windows and deface textbooks in 17 of Colfax Avenue Elementary’s 25 classrooms.

Colfax Avenue Elementary School teacher Marcia Weiss tearfully surveyed the destruction wreaked on her school early Tuesday by vandals.

Desks were overturned, a dozen computers smashed, carpets drenched with green paint, windows shattered, piles of textbooks soaked with orange juice, holes punched through ceiling tiles, and students’ artwork torn to shreds.

“This is supposed to be a haven for the children from all that street gang stuff, and now they don’t even have this,” she said angrily, sweeping crumpled papers, broken crayons, and shards of window glass into a pile in the middle of her third-grade classroom.

The scene was repeated throughout the school as students, teachers, parents and neighbors worked to undo the vandalism that school district police say may have been gang-related. Police would not give details but a teacher said gang graffiti was found.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials reported that the damage to 17 of Colfax’s 25 classrooms will exceed $27,000.

It was one of a rash of mishaps and vandalism districtwide in recent weeks.

More than $300,000 in damage was done when fire hit Mt. Gleason Junior High School in Tujunga. The cause is being investigated. In the last month, approximately 50 broken windows had to be replaced at Polytechnic High School in North Hollywood and Granada Hills, Verdugo Hills and Sylmar high schools. Officials believe the suspects were looking for money because desk drawers were pulled out but no equipment was taken.

Theft and vandalism cost the school district $6.1 million in the 1989-90 school year.

At Colfax, the vandals broke in early Tuesday morning, apparently after a school patrol car made its usual rounds at midnight, said Gabriel Cortina, superintendent of school Region E. The intruders apparently broke windows next to doors, then reached in to open the locks. The damage would have taken at least two hours to inflict, Cortina said.

While some district schools have burglar alarms, Colfax does not because it has been virtually free of vandalism and gang-related problems, Cortina said. “Because of budget cutbacks we can’t afford to put alarms in every school. So the ones with the most problems get them.”

Most of the school’s 630 children were sent home for the day because their classrooms were unusable. Informal classes were held for students with working parents on the school grounds, in the library and in eight classrooms untouched by the vandals. School was expected to be back in full session today.

Principal Elisabeth Norton-Douglass and a teacher discovered the break-in when they arrived about 7 a.m., Norton-Douglass said. “I had never seen anything like it in my 20 years of teaching,” Norton-Douglass said. “I’m just real sad and devastated. So much of what we have was hard-won by parents who raised money for computers and books and other items.”

She estimated that a dozen of the school’s classroom computers were destroyed, as were a microwave oven, overhead projectors, radios and typewriters. Some classrooms had been sprayed with fire extinguishers. A kindergarten art project, which depicted friendship among peoples of the world, was torn from the wall and trampled. Gallons of orange juice, which were part of earthquake preparedness kits, were poured on desks, floors, books and elsewhere.

In one classroom, the vandals smashed an aquarium, but first placed the guppies it contained safely in cups of water.

Steve Simon, a TV camera operator, said that what happened at first made him think of sending his fifth-grade son to private school, but that “maybe moving out of Los Angeles altogether” was the only way to keep his child safe.

But Kristin Garbett, whose two children attend the school, pulled off her heavy work gloves and said, “The solution isn’t to run. You just can’t give them the territory.”