By Kathleen Acuff

Four Mountain View High School students whose senior prank went too far are back in school after district trustees voted to expel them.

The Santa Clara County Office of Education heard the students’ appeal and overturned the mid-March decision of the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District Board of Trustees only days after the trustees’ vote.

According to Brigitte Sarraf, the district’s associate superintendent for educational services, two of the students, both on the baseball team, chose to return to Mountain View High, and two chose to remain “in alternative settings.” One of the latter students attends Alta Vista High, and the other is finishing community college classes.

Mountain View High School Principal Pat Hyland said the students glued locks shut all over campus in December with the idea of shutting school down for a day. The boys did their work so thoroughly that handles had to be removed from a couple of the doors.

“Sometimes pranks that start out small get ratcheted up over the school year,” Hyland said.

“It’s costly to repair things and get the school back as if it hadn’t happened and maintain the campus as the community expects. It’s an investment we try hard to protect,” she added.

No official comment on the cost of the damage or whether the students are making restitution was available at press time.

The graffiti that accompanied the vandalism has been described elsewhere as not malicious. Neither Sarraf nor Hyland agreed with that characterization, although they would not otherwise describe it.

The glued-locks incident is unrelated to the vandalism for which Hyland is offering a reward of $1,000. Someone graffitied lockers on campus with ineradicable highlighter and defaced a table in the quad with an obscenity: “F— you Mountain View.” Anyone with information can call the school office at 940-4600.