This year, Malvern Prep has seen an increase in vandalism in all bathrooms, negatively impacting the entire community. An individual or individuals drew recognizable signed graffiti in various bathrooms and classrooms across campus over the fall, otherwise known to the student body as “King Loco.” Mrs. Korin Folan, Head of Character Development and Wellness, spoke about the incidents. 

“It kind of goes against everything that [Malvern is] about. We have a beautiful campus, a beautiful space that we are fortunate to have. Many people on this campus, as I’ve heard from students, faculty, and staff, are upset to know that somebody is continuing to do this graffiti and vandalism. I think when one thing happens, it impacts our whole community negatively because it’s against what we’re about,” Folan said. 

As stated in Malvern Prep’s 2024-2025 handbook, “Defacing school buildings, school property, and/or another student’s private property is considered vandalism and will not be tolerated. A student involved in vandalism will not only face severe penalties but will have to make full restitution as well.” Malvern’s incredible maintenance team has worked countless hours to cover up graffiti and to plan how to prevent it.

“I’ll be honest; we’ve done a lot of research on how to curb graffiti and other things in bathrooms. It’s a huge problem in most schools. It’s the one place that students can go [where] you can’t have cameras. Something [our maintenance staff has] done in one of the bathrooms is there is a special paint that you can get, making it a lot easier to remove the graffiti,” Folan said. 

At one point, only one bathroom was open, which caused excessive lines. Waiting to use the bathroom would take 15 minutes out of class, especially when there was one bathroom for 200 students. Austin Trout, a Malvern Prep senior, is tired of the vandalism and hopes it will end soon. 

“I feel as though ‘King Loco’ is really annoying and just an inconvenience. I don’t feel like walking across campus if I have to go to the bathroom. I hope it stops,” Trout said.

Mr. Dan Popernack, an Upper School language teacher, is very disappointed and passionate about the situation. Because most bathrooms near his classroom were closed for an extended period, Mr. Popernak felt interrupted in class when students would be out for ten minutes walking to the available bathroom and waiting.

“That extra five minutes [just] to walk to another place to use the bathroom, if you multiply that by the [number] of students who are inconvenienced by it, we’re talking about hours and hours of lost learning just over some graffiti,” Popernack said.

Mr. Popernack is not just disappointed with the graffiti from King Loco and other anonymous students. He is seeing an increase in all areas of vandalism in bathrooms.

“Filling up the bathroom [sinks] with paper, not cleaning up after themselves, urinating on walls, and just making a mess of the place. This year, besides the whole King Loco thing, has been pretty atrocious. This is not a place where you should be going out of your way to make somebody’s day suck,” Popernack said. 

Grant Chisholm, a junior at Malvern Prep, is another person who hates to see what is going on around campus.

“I think it’s very disappointing how people think it’s okay to disrespect the campus that many people try and work hard on,” Chisholm said.

Mr. Jeff Kinney, Head of Maintenance, took time out of his busy schedule to share some information from the maintenance perspective.

“As far as impacting our team, it took us away from our everyday tasks that need to be done [daily] to keep this place moving. The large amount of money was all the man-hours to fix the damage and the inconvenience to the entire student body.

[Approximately] six man-days to get the bathroom back to being used again. Think about this amazing opportunity that you have here at Malvern, and don’t take that for granted because several students wish they had the same opportunity to attend this great school,” Kinney said.

Although this is a very negative experience for the maintenance team, they all remain positive and have hope for the future.

“I truly believe most, if not all, of the students here at Malvern understand and respect the school and the property. I hope this behavior stops and [that we will] be the role model school we are. We often have many guests on campus, and we shadow a lot of students. I hope they will come here someday. We cannot continue with this behavior anymore; it’s not who we are,” Kinney said.

As a Malvern community, we need to come together and end all forms of vandalism to all parts of the campus. We are very fortunate to go to a school like this. Many people work countless hours to make this campus look perfect. Together we can do it!