Police have identified and located four youths after a burglary and damage at a Rotorua school last weekend.
Six classrooms and two cloak bay areas at Western Heights Primary School were ransacked on Sunday, with paint thrown across the carpet, walls and desks, and children’s work destroyed.
Senior Sergeant Sam Parata, Rotorua area prevention manager, said today that the community was understandably disappointed to see the amount of damage done to the school.
“This behaviour is unacceptable, and police have worked hard to identify and locate those believed to be responsible.”
The four youths had been referred to Youth Aid.
Principal Brent Griffin told the Rotorua Daily Post on Monday that he had never seen anything like it, describing the scene as “catastrophic destruction”.
“In the 24 years I’ve been here, we’ve had two events involving vandalism but nothing to this degree.”
About 35 staff and community members helped with the clean-up on Sunday.
“We were on our hands and knees in there with shovels, dustpans and things, scooping paint off the carpet, windows. There was vulgarity written … it was a pretty confronting thing to walk into.”
Staff shed “a lot of tears” on seeing the damage.
“It looked like it had been hit by a hurricane.”
Four of the classrooms were for junior students. Their Lego was “all covered in paint”.
“All of their mahi, their work that they’d done, their paintings and everything, had been spattered with paint, ripped off the walls and damaged.
“This is heartbreaking for our kura. An estimated cost to repair the damage will exceed $75,000.
“To my staff and community members who spent over four hours reshaping the classrooms, trying to save the tamariki’s mahi, removing paint, my heart felt aroha goes out to you.”
In a Facebook update on Monday, he said the damage was “immense”.
“The carpets and vinyls will all need replacing, and so many kids’ resources have had to be binned. One large cloak bay will require a complete renovation. Teachers have lost valuable resources, and we have lost brand new tablets from the junior school.”