When Vandana Kumar's family visited her in Los Angeles, they always stopped at a bronze plaque embedded in a Woodland Hills sidewalk honoring her 25 years as a science teacher at Canoga Park High School.
His family posed for photos with the plaque, which was installed in 2018, as if it were part of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And then, in recent weeks, it was torn down, most likely by someone looking to sell it for scrap, officials said.
“I was upset, I’m not going to lie,” Kumar, 60, said of the robbery.
She is one of 11 teachers whose honorary plaques were torn from a sidewalk on Victory Boulevard in Woodland Hills over the past month. Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Blumenfield this week announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the robberies.
“It's not about my badge,” Kumar said. “It's about someone having the audacity” to steal something built to honor teachers, he said.
Kumar attends an unveiling ceremony for his plaque in 2018.
(Nupur Kumar)
Blumenfield's office said in a statement Thursday that the theft “has created significant damage to the sidewalks, as well as the loss of these landmarks that are financially valuable and significant to the surrounding community.”
The Walk of Hearts Foundation, a nonprofit organization that honors exceptional Valley teachers, installs several plaques each year.
Each plate is worth about $4,000 and weighs about 40 pounds, said Los Angeles Police Capt. Rodolfo Lopez.
Lopez said the video captured someone stealing four license plates in one night, but the images were too blurry for facial recognition technology to identify them. Seven more plates went missing in the following weeks and Lopez said the department believes the thefts are related.
Local scrap metal dealers were alerted to the thefts and told to contact police if anyone came in to sell the plates, Lopez said.
The Los Angeles area has recently seen an increase in thefts of metal objects, including copper and bronze, which can be sold for scrap metal.
The famous lights on the 6th Street Viaduct were recently turned off after thieves stole the bridge's copper wiring. More than 100 plaque thefts have been reported at two cemeteries in Carson and Compton, and a bronze statue of a newsboy was stolen from MacArthur Park.
Joseph Andrews, founder of the Walk of Hearts Foundation, said in an email that the robberies in Woodland Hills “violated the community in many ways.” The person responsible has “stolen not only a bronze plaque,” he said, but “a part of a teacher's legacy.”
In total, the stolen license plates were worth about $44,000, not including the cost of sidewalk repairs.
Kumar retired last year from Canoga Park High and said the plaque was part of his legacy. As a Hindu, she will be cremated when she dies, she said, so the plaque was a physical reminder of who she was, to the point that she used to joke with her director: “When you see flowers on my plaque, I'll know I'm gone.”
