Thessaloniki Municipality to make perpetrators pay for school vandalism

The Municipality of Thessaloniki is taking the unusual step of seeking to slap 10 teenagers and their parents with the cost of repairs to a school they vandalized in a rampage on Sunday night.

In a post on social media on Tuesday, the city’s deputy mayor for education, Ioanna Kosmopoulou, said that the local authority will be taking recourse to justice to seek compensation for the desks, chairs, bathroom sinks, windows, electronics and other equipment the teens smashed at the northern port city’s Efklidis technical high school (EPAL).

The 10 teenagers, whose ages range from 14 to 19, were arrested in the act, as the schools had been fitted with an alarm system last spring following several similar incidents.

According to Kosmopoulou, the vandals – most of whom are students at the institution – broke into the Efklidis school complex in the downtown district of Agia Triada and smashed everything in sight, “without a care for what their classmates or they themselves would come to school to the next day.”

“But who’s going to pay the ferryman? This time, after making a full assessment of the damage, we will try to claim the cost to what is public property. Because such macho posturing comes at a price. And that price must be paid,” she said, lamenting that vandalism has become “a new sign of the times.”

Kosmopoulou did not specify how much the repairs cost.