Education: JUST IN FUN

This havoc was created not by a demolition squad, but by three nine-year-old boys. On a Sunday afternoon they broke into Brooklyn's Public School 173 by cutting a window screen, rampaged until suppertime. When the janitor arrived next morning, he found windows shattered, pictures torn, walls smeared, light bulbs smashed, desks and chairs ripped apart, a grand piano stripped of keys and strings, the remnants of two bonfires, the leavings of crackers and jam in a domestic science kitchen, a total of 21 classrooms in shambles. The damage—which added up to $5,000 in a five-page, single-spaced report—was so extensive that school...