“Help me,” “you are loved” and “does anybody have a cart?” These are three examples of relatively commonplace graffiti that can be seen scrawled on desks or written in sharpie on a bathroom stall at DGS.
Incidents of petty vandalism are nothing new to US public school institutions with 35.8% of public schools reporting incidents of criminal vandalism according to the National Center for Education Statistics; that is to say, students have been writing on the walls of bathrooms for decades. But as the frequency of these issues increases, so does their severity.
Supervisor of buildings & grounds Mike Reyes directly oversees and facilitates any and all maintenance that is done anywhere on campus, including damage control following an incident of vandalism, an issue he said has grown in severity since he graduated from high school.
“We didn’t grow up with cell phones and social media. A few years ago, we had to deal with the devious licks stuff which was perpetuated on TikTok. Not to say that we didn’t have our own antics as high school students; I vividly remember throwing show flyers for bands around the building– not destructive, but definitely a mess,” Reyes said.
Buildings & grounds executive administrative assistant Alex Jones corroborated Reyes’ notion, agreeing that while the two got up to their own hijinks in high school, they were far from truly damaging.
“The property damage, we didn’t really do that. I think we were more connected to our environments. I understood that if I broke it, it’s probably not going to get fixed quickly, and I don’t necessarily want to be without it,” Jones said.
Recent incidents of vandalism in bathrooms have sparked conversation about the relationship with a student body and the school building they inhabit.
This past summer, before the start of the school year, an incident of criminal vandalism left the school with a hole in the roof and a bill for tens of thousands of dollars in damages. Reyes and CMG staff were on-site dealing with the fallout of this incident before the start of the 24-25 year.
“We’ve dealt with a lot of graffiti–a lot of destruction in the last few years. Right at the beginning of the school, right before school started, we had somebody get on the building. They caused tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage and countless hours of work to fix the facade of the building,” Reyes said.
“They spray painted the front of the building, tossed the antennas off the building, and then they put a bunch of cinder blocks through the roof. So we had to have roofing repair, antenna repair and then we had to paint an area of the building all from one event,” he continued.
Senior Stacia Thames, a summer employee of the bookstore and IT office, spoke of her experience being inside of the building when the damage was first discovered.
“The day was wild. I walked in with my Dunkin, and everybody was like, we need you downstairs ASAP. Our Chromebooks, like the fresh ones we had, were soaked. There was a big hole in the ceiling because [students] had pulled out the pipes. So we had to just try to unbox and salvage as many computers as we could–the leaking was crazy because it had just rained the morning before,” Thames said.
The consensus from all three individuals was that while some level of goofing off in highschool is expected, incidents like this one simply take it too far.
“Some students just don’t have a vested interest. When students feel connected to a building, they typically will treat it as such,” Reyes said.
“Big damages like that to the property [are] unnecessary and not reasonable. Like, come on. We could do better. The more y’all break stuff the more you have to pay at the cafe,” Thames said.
