Officials “will actively pursue” finding and prosecuting those responsible for obscenity-laced graffiti discovered this week at two city schools, Vicksburg Warren School District Superintendent Dr. James Price said Wednesday.

Custodians discovered the spray-painted symbols and words Monday morning at Vicksburg High School and Tuesday morning at Vicksburg Junior High School. Cleanup costs were estimated at several thousand dollars.

“I spoke to the chief of police yesterday, and they are working on it,” Price said Wednesday. Investigators are following several leads, and trying to determine if the same culprits are responsible for graffiti found at both schools. “There were some similarities in the markings they left but there’s no confirmation yet that the same people were involved.”

Randy Naylor, a police officer in his fifth year as school resource officer at VJHS, said Wednesday that four “people of interest” have been identified but he had not talked to them yet. He declined to name the four — teens between 15 and 18 — as suspects, but said they would be questioned.

“That’s my school, and I love it,” Naylor said. “I can’t have that in my school.”

At least one of the graffiti messages at the junior high referred to a purported youth gang in the city that police have linked to a March shooting death in a Vicksburg Housing Authority subdivision. Three teens have been indicted and arraigned on murder charges, with their trial date set for Feb. 22.

Asked about the possibility of gangs in the schools, Price echoed comments made Tuesday by district resource and law enforcement officer De-wayne Sims.  “We don’t see any signs of organized gang activity in the buildings,” Price said. “There’s a lot of wannabes out there — they mimic it, but there’s no organized structure to it.”

Price said apart from the graffiti, the opening of school last week went very well and was one of the smoothest ever for the district. Administrators are tracking enrollments, with the numbers steadily increasing as is normal for this early in the school year.

“We will end up with a little over 9,000 (students) by September,” Price said. “Every day Ms. (Debra) Hullum sits down and goes through the numbers in each classroom.” Particularly in kindergarten but also in first grade, students often are enrolled in school late each year as parents keep them home as long as possible, he said.

Hullum, assistant superintendent, monitors enrollments to keep class sizes balanced, Price said. Class size for kindergarten and first grade caps at 27. As new arrivals come in and swell enrollments, some cross-zone school transfers are arranged and additional teachers sometimes have to be hired. In that case, students must be moved into new classrooms, a difficult adjustment for young children.

“It’s traumatic for the kids,” Price said. “It only takes one day for a kindergartner to bond with his teacher — and vice versa. After a few weeks the bond is even stronger. Who do you move from the other three classes into the new class? It’s very difficult, and parents don’t realize the trauma they create for the other children in the class.”

Mississippi does not require that children be enrolled in kindergarten. If parents do enroll them, the students must attend unless formally withdrawn from school. The state allows one withdrawal, and then if the child is re-enrolled, he cannot be withdrawn again.

Price also was awaiting more information from the Mississippi Department of Education on the outcome of May’s standardized testing, the MCT2 tests at the elementary level and the subject area tests at the secondary.

Raw scores have been compiled but embargoed — not permitted to be publicly released — by the state until comparisons with the previous year’s scores can be compiled, he said.

The schools’ “report cards,” a descriptive system instituted last year that replaced the former numerical rankings, will probably be issued in October.

Formerly, schools were ranked from level five, highest rating, down to level one, based on their students’ test scores. The new system uses seven terms to describe school performance, from “star” down to “failing.”

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Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com