An unknown culprit stole items from history teacher Pete Bjorklund’s room, P-15, and English teacher Michael Smith’s room, 502. The administration suspects that the burglaries occurred over the weekend and notified the police.

“We already called the cops and told them as much information as we can,” Assistant Principal Galen Rosenberg said. “I think it’s good to have some level of coverage in the papers because it’s possible that somebody knows what happened. We can assume that it was somebody who is associated with the high school, but that is not necessarily the case.”

Stolen items include computer equipment, a projector, and a television. There was no evidence found that would indicate a break-in, and the means of entry are at this point unknown.

This incident occurred about a month after the break-in of Assistant Principal Ms. Dawson’s offices, causing the administration to look into the effects and possible prevention methods. There were no major similarities between the two cases.

“The means of entry were different,” Rosenberg said. “They broke the window of Ms. Dawson’s office, but there was no evidence of a break-in this time. It was damaging that they broke two windows, but they hardly got anything of value, whereas with this one, we don’t know how they got in, but they did steal some stuff of value.”

With these differences, there is no evidence to suggest that the two incidents were related.

“Obviously we hope that it’s a sort of unfortunate coincidence that we’ve had these two break-ins within such proximity to each other,” Rosenberg said. “Often times these things involve the same persons. We’ll see what happens in this case. When things happen during school, we can almost always figure out who did it. Sometimes it’s hard to know what happens after hours when no one is around.”

The administration has been discussing the possibility of installing further security to attempt to prevent break-ins and burglaries like this one. However, the worth of a security system in the school is still unclear.

“Mountain View has cameras on campus but we don’t,” Rosenberg said. “We have not felt that they would actually have either deterred or caught suspects in most of the incidents that we have had here. ”

The school used to have a bell system installed in order to counteract break-ins. It is not clear whether or not this system actually helped prevent crimes.

“[The bell system] was a huge expense,” Rosenberg said. “Plus the alarms would go off with false alarms all the time … so we got rid of that. There definitely has not been any increase in theft. That was many years ago. There’s lots of debate about whether or not some kind of security system is actually worth it.”