Burglars Steal Riches from the Poor

By Olivia Leigh in News on Nov 21, 2006 7:00PM

There are bad guys, and then there are really bad guys. A bad guy might not tell cashiers that they gave him back a dime too much. And then there are the people like the recent vandals on the South Side - really bad guys that ransack schools for their taking.

Several phone calls were made to police around 1 a.m. on Sunday regarding strange activity at Hendricks Community Academy, located at 4316 S. Princeton; however, the damage was not discovered until about 10 p.m. the same day, when school staff arrived on the scene.

Police and staff discovered a school gone topsy-turvy, with damage estimated to be nearly $100,000, including missing electronics and science lab kits, and smashed or damaged security monitors and payroll equipment.

Hendricks is part of the CPS Magnet Cluster program, and specializes in teaching math and science in the neighborhood where nearly 97 percent of the 387 students are low-income.

One of the most damaging blows was to the school’s supply of Dell computers. Prinicpal Mary Jean Smith, who started overseeing the school’s operations three years ago, made updated technology a priority on her to-do list, as “ancient” computers at the school were often the norm. Just last August, the school bought 30 new flat-screen monitors, a third of which were stolen during the looting.

As quoted in the Trib, eighth-grader Samuel Rogers, speaking beyond his years, said he wasn’t scared as much as disappointed: "Why would anyone want to break into this school? I don't understand … we need those computers. We need all the education we can get."

A young student tried to cheer up a teacher who found out part of her master’s degree case study was on a stolen computer by saying that “maybe the burglars wanted to practice their arithmetic on Math Blasters,” an educational computer program.

While such views are clearly a product of childlike naïveté, we can only dream that educational computer programs would help the burglars wise up and realize the damaging cycle they help to create with each computer stolen.

Image via SecurityProNews.com