Students, teachers and volunteers from the community are working to clean up the mess after a Catholic school in Long Beach was left vandalized Monday morning.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Classrooms were ransacked, religious symbols destroyed and equipment was stolen at the school at Holy Innocents Catholic Church.<\/p>\n
According to the school\u2019s principal, Cyril Cruz, the damage in one room alone that was used to teach Catechism classes is estimated at about $30,000.<\/p>\n
Police say it is not clear if it was one person or a group of people who broke into this school.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes when people talk about private schools, they equate that with money. And ultimately, the majority of our students are on tuition assistance,\u201d Cruz said. \u201cLike, we are in a not so very good neighborhood, you know. We are a Title I school. We receive Title I funding. Like we are a low economic community here, you know, but their faith is strong.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Long Beach police say lots of things were stolen as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A statue of Mother Mary got its head broken off, food was thrown everywhere, holy books tossed to the ground and cabinets pried open.<\/p>\n
Technology was also ripped from the walls and the students\u2019 music instruments were smashed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The school\u2019s principal says that through the pain, she is so proud of how her students are taking this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t know if there is some healing that needs to be done or if there’s some hatred towards like, the religious objects or towards a Catholic church or something like that,\u201d Cruz said. \u201cWe don’t know, but our students are just continuing to pray for them so I think that’s so beautiful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students, teachers and volunteers from the community are working to clean up the mess after a Catholic school…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-162041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-long-beach","8":"tag-long-beach","9":"tag-long-beach-headlines","10":"tag-long-beach-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}