04/06/2006
Flat River Middle School students take anti-vandalism message on the road
By: Jessica Selby
 

Back in September, Taylor Therrien approached her teacher with an idea.

"I am seeing a lot of vandalism happening around us, is there anything we can do?" Therrien, a seventh grader at Flat River Middle School, asked her teacher, Charlie Blanchette.
Between Therrien's motivation, her fellow students' willingness to help and her teacher's dedication, action was taken.

A committee consisting of approximately 10 students was formed. The group calls itself Students Against Vandalism Everywhere, or SAVE. To date, this group has made amazing strides in its mission to combat vandalism in the Pawtuxet Valley.

Most recently, the students took their campaign on the road. Blanchette took four of the students on the SAVE committee, Taylor Therrien, Sarah Karn, Henry Gardner and Joey Rocchio, to West Brook, Maine, where they spoke about their efforts at a Service to America conference at the University of Southern Maine.

"I can't believe how big our idea has become," Therrien said. "I thought it would have taken us years but it has only been months and we just keep building on it more and more."
At the conference, the SAVE committee members told students from all over New England who listened to their presentation about how they aided the West Warwick Police Department in an criminal investigation and about how they have helped to save a local cemetery from repeat vandalism attacks.

In November 2005, about 30 headstones at St. Mary's Cemetery in West Warwick were toppled. This site had been the target in a stream of vandalism over the years. Scott Amaral, West Warwick community police officer, and West Warwick Detective Mark Bennett contacted the anti-vandalism committee at Flat River Middle School to see if there was anything they, as students, could do to help with the problem.

The students created a series of signs, each one with a catchy slogan against vandalism. One of the signs reads "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Vandalism Smells." Another reads "It's all Fun and Games Until It's Your Car" and pictures a car with graffiti on its side.

The students hung the signs, which they had laminated, at locations around the Valley that have fallen victim to vandalism. Some are in schools, some were created as flyers and passed out by hand to students, and others are at cemeteries and parks around town. They made a special sign to use exclusively at St. Mary's in response to the repeat offenses committed there.
"We wanted to use rhythms so that people would read them and then remember them," Therrien said.

According to Amaral, this was the first time that students at that grade level have ever taken such an active role without an adult driving the mission.

"The response we received from those students had a very positive effect on our investigation," Bennett said, in an article that appeared in the Times in January. "Based on what they did, we have issued an arrest warrant for someone in connection with the gravestone toppling in 2004. This definitely was an admirable thing that they did."

SAVE members took pictures of everything they had done along the way and compiled them into a Power Point presentation which they took with them for their presentation at the conference. In addition to the Power Point, they also presented facts, statistics and other staggering bits of information to their student audience.

The Coventry Police Department recorded 235 reports of vandalism in 2005. Those acts of vandalism estimated an approximate $170,000 in clean up costs.

"I think a lot of people that commit these crimes don't realize how serious they are," Blanchette said. "If you're caught, it's not just a slap on the wrist. There are federal laws that protect cemeteries from vandalism, with the cheapest fine for offenders costing around $10,000 and putting them in prison for up to three years.

"This is not a petty crime," he said. "There are a lot of hidden costs involved in these pranks that can cost people or the town a lot of money in an already tight budget. So what ends up happening is taxpayers get shortchanged because someone thinks it's funny to paint on a wall or knock a mailbox or a gravestone over. Well, it's not."

The students from Flat River Middle School were the only middle school-aged students to present at the conference, Blanchette said. There were however, two groups from Coventry High School that attended the conference as well. The students in Gene Dufault's carpentry class who constructed ramps for elderly housing in their community attended and the students in Kathy Hudson's child development class spoke about their investment in life-like dolls for their project to end teen pregnancy.