Unknown suspects damaged a giant mural at the Manhattan Beach Middle School campus late last month, scrawling graffiti over the school’s mascot and prompting a police investigation into the vandalism.
Written across a massive wall-size painting of a wave at the heart of campus, the graffiti featured insignia suggesting that it may have been inspired by the decision, made over the summer, to rotate principals among Manhattan Beach Unified School District campuses. District officials said at the time that the shifts were intended to enhance innovative thinking and leadership, but they drew complaints from parents during meetings leading up to the decision.
The taggers signed the work “by the eighth grade boys,” and the letters “BBJ” were prominently featured. While it is unclear what the letters mean, authorities are investigating the possibility that they stand for “Bring Back John” or “Bring Back Jackson,” in reference to previous MBMS principal John Jackson, who is now principal at Robinson.
The graffiti was discovered Sept. 24 by a community member walking through campus, said MBMS Principal Kim Linz. (Linz was principal at Pacific before being rotated to the middle school.) Staff members arranged to cover the mural for the coming school week, so as not to shock what Linz described as an already saddened student body.
“The kids were upset that someone would do that. That mural is really important to the school,” Linz said.
The school reached out to the artist behind the original mural, and arranged for him to return and paint over the markings, work that was completed by last Wednesday. Linz could not immediately provide the cost of the repainting, but said was paid for with funds from the PTA rather than the district budget.
The district reported the vandalism to the Manhattan Beach Police Department, who assigned Officer Jesse Garcia, the district’s school resources officer, to the case. Reached for comment, Garcia referred questions about the investigation to Sgt. Tim Zins, community affairs officer for the department.
Zins said the investigation was ongoing, and that there had been no arrests in the case, but an on-campus security camera may have captured the vandals in the act.
An unnamed school official told officers during the initial investigation that the “BBJ” may have been written in response to Jackson’s departure, according to the police report.
“Whether that’s actually why, we don’t know yet,” Zins said.
Linz said that despite the tag attributing to the “eighth grade boys,” school staff have also not reached a conclusion about the party responsible.
“We definitely want to be careful about jumping too quick to judgment,” she said.
As of Tuesday afternoon, officers working on the case had not interviewed any students, Zins said.
At the time the principal rotation plan was unveiled, MBUSD Superintendent Mike Matthews said in a letter to district parents that the “optimal window” of time for helming a school was five to eight years.” Matthews, who first became a school principal at age 29, said that the position’s “learning curve…begins to flatten out after eight years.” Of the four principals involved in the plan — Linz; Jackson; Nancy Doyle, formerly of Robinson and now at Grand View; and Rhonda Steinberg, formerly of Grand View and now at Pacific — each had been in their posts at least 10 years, Matthews said.
The move generated considerable controversy. In a special board meeting held the morning before the decision was made, board president Ellen Rosenberg, vice president Jennifer Cochran, and clerk Karen Komatinsky called opponents of the rotation measure “mean girls.”
The comments were captured on a cell phone by Dina Abt, a Grand View kindergarten teacher, and came after the board members asked whether the district’s live stream service had been turned off.
Citing both these comments and the overall principal rotation scheme, Shawn Chen, an English teacher at Mira Costa, said the district was engaging in a “rash and pedagogically unsound disruption to the learning communities you are entrusted with.”
