While many school buildings in the inner city turn into murals for scrawled obscenities, gang tags and aerosol art, the brick walls of North Bendale Jr. Public School in Scarborough have remained deliciously free of blight.
So the locals found it a little ironic when school staff recently began dousing the outside lights, ostensibly to save energy but also to deprive the spray-can brigade of the illumination they apparently crave.
Annoyed and a little puzzled at being cast into the dark, residents of the North Bendale neighbourhood, near Ellesmere and McCowan, last month summoned school board officials to a meeting.
"When the winter came, we started noticing it and people starting talking," says Yvonne Taylor, a 55-year-old civil servant who heads the North Bendale Community Association.
The school sits at the north end of a pretty little well-used, well-lit city park frequented in the evenings by the dog-walking set. But some park users have to cross the darkened North Bendale field on their way home. "There's a safety issue," argues Ms. Taylor. "You don't know who's lurking in a dark corner."
The so-called broken-windows theory of urban crime suggests that evidence of unchecked neglect, such as graffiti, encourages further illegal activities. No illumination means no tagging, which means less crime - or so the theory goes.
But Inspector Heinz Kuck, the Toronto Police Service's graffiti expert, cites years of research that demonstrates how those engaged in criminal activity are drawn to poorly lit areas. "The literature and empirical police experience shows that when there's an increase in lighting, there's an increase in potential witnesses and we generally have a reduction in crime."
North Bendale is an L-shaped, two-storey school built in the late 1950s, which houses about 130 children. The walls bear virtually no trace of graffiti, according to Scott Harrison, the Toronto District School Board trustee for the area, who attended the school. He says that apart from a drug-related lockdown two years ago, there's little dealing in the area. "It's a relatively calm community" compared to others, he says. "Nothing comes to light, no pun intended."
At the school, interior lights go off at about 9 p.m., and the exterior lights are switched off about two hours later. There was a dead bulb in a lamp standard on the edge of the playground, but it has been repaired, he says.
During the community meeting at North Bendale, Mr. Harrison handed out an article about school districts in California and Texas that had apparently killed two policy birds with one switch - simultaneously reducing electricity consumption and vandalism by turning off the lights. He claims that "99 per cent" of schools in his ward turn off exterior lights. When the lights were on, he adds, "it allowed people to hang out in the parking lot."
TDSB officials, like Sheila Penny, executive director of facilities, agree in principle with the graffiti-discouraging strategy, although she says that there's no across-the-board policy. Indeed, according to a 2004 staff report, "It has been the TDSB experience that vandalism and graffiti damage decreases when exterior lights are turned off at night. A similar observation has been made by school boards across North America."
That line is a bit of an overstatement. School districts in San Antonio, Texas, and Livermore, Calif., adopted dark-campus policies in 1973 and 1974; a few other U.S. boards followed.
An interview with an official with the Livermore board confirms that it is no longer "official policy," but the positive results from those early experiments continue to be cited in various articles on the Internet, many of them posted by astronomy organizations that want to reduce light pollution.
Ms. Penny says exterior lighting decisions are the purview of the principals and area superintendents.
Elsewhere, the TDSB spent $666,000 for graffiti removal in 2007-08, according to TDSB spokesperson Kelly Baker.
Ms. Taylor of the North Bendale Community Association is eager to point out that the residents of her community are not indifferent to environmental concerns, and warmly support local greening initiatives. But when presented with a choice between conservation and safety, she says she'd pick the latter without hesitation. "Safety is my priority."
As it happens, the community association presented Mr. Harrison with a possible solution: installing motion detectors. But Ms. Taylor isn't optimistic: "They're not going to do that," she says. "They didn't hear us."
Ms. Penny allows that some schools do install light-activating motion detectors, but notes that these, too, draw complaints from neighbours who don't like to be disturbed by the on-again-off-again nature of such devices. "I would suggest that that's a local decision," she says.