T’was the night before graduation when the school district discovered significant damage and vandalism at John Muir Elementary School and Santa Monica Alternative Schoolhouse (SMASH).
The incident was shared to Santa Monica families in an email from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. The Santa Monica Police Department found five kids—ages 11-13—at fault.
“Three of them also caused some damage at Will Rogers Community and Roosevelt Elementary School on the same evening,” the school district shared in an email. “Four of the students are current students in the Santa Monica-Malibu USD schools. One is not from the area.”
The damage occurred on Saturday night, June 9; though nothing was stolen, the district reported damages to the “classrooms, library, cafetorium, stage, teacher’s lounge, bookroom and exterior areas.”
Damage was sustained in the form of destroyed furniture, dumped cans of paint on the exterior walls, flooded rooms (by turning on the sinks) and fire extinguisher powder sprayed on various surfaces.
The school district shared that this was not the first time the area had been vandalized; it has noted two other incidents at the Muir/SMASH site, though none as serious as the most recent one.
Muir Elementary was cleaned in time for the fifth grade graduation ceremony at 9 a.m. However, classrooms were not ready for the last week of classes given the extent of damage.
The students involved in the crime “will receive discipline and consequences as appropriate for these crimes,” Dr. Ben Drati said in an emailed statement from the school district.
Editor’s note: The headline has been updated.