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It was just after 1 am when Los Angeles charter school superintendent Ian Mcfeat started getting text messages and phone calls at a relative’s house where he was sheltering from the fires.
His neighbors said his house was burning down in the wildfires – along with his entire Altadena neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Aveson School of Leaders, which McFeat runs and where his kids attended school just three blocks from his house, was also burning.
Unable to sleep, Mcfeat drove away from his in-law’s house that he’d been evacuated to and made the drive back to Altadena.
He drove through the fire lines and into his neighborhood to see if he could salvage anything, save anyone, or put out the fires that had raged on the east side for more than 48 hours straight, and decimated the Palisades in the west.
He was greeted with a scene out of a horror movie. Fueled by a violent windstorm and piles of brush left from a particularly wet winter last year, the firestorm was like a tornado shooting flames, blasting through his neighborhood.
“It was like driving through a bomb scene,” said Mcfeat. “There were homes exploding. I probably shouldn’t have been there.”
Despite the devastating losses, Mcfeat can’t imagine not rebuilding his home and school right where they were in Altadena. But the road to recovery will be a long and painful one.
“No doubt about it. We are going to rebuild,” said Mcfeat. Aveson has started a GoFundMe. At this point, a new site for the school has not been identified. The district hasn’t been able to help them yet.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Mcfeat.
The wildfires that burned Los Angeles this month are the costliest and most destructive in the city’s history, displacing more than 150,000 residents and killing at least 25 people. Two massive blazes fed by windstorms, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, simultaneously scorched the city from the sea to the mountains, filling the air with vast plumes of ash and smoke.
As the wind and flames began to retreat last week, and firefighters gained control of the fires, schools began to reopen. And the kids began to return to class.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, which is by far the largest district of about 80 in Los Angeles County, resumed instruction Monday after being totally closed since last Thursday. Seven schools remain shut because they’re located in evacuation zones. Another three won’t reopen because their buildings were badly burned or destroyed in the fires.
Dozens of much smaller districts in Los Angeles County also reopened this week, with the exceptions of two districts, Pasadena Unified, which encompasses Altadena, and La Cañada Unified, which neighbors Altadena to the west.
The Eaton fire has destroyed at least five schools but was mostly contained by Friday.
Kids from two of the LAUSD schools that burned in the Palisades, Marquez Charter Elementary School and Palisades Charter Elementary School, were placed, with intact school rosters, in close-ish LAUSD school buildings that already had other schools in them.
The students who attended the burned schools were given their own entrances, classrooms and courtyards for kids to play. When parents dropped them off at class this week, there were a lot of tearful reunions.
Families from Palisades Charter were somber, but excited to return to normalcy with their new space located inside of Brentwood Science Magnet School.
Joseph Koshki, a parent from the Palisades whose son attends third grade at Palisades Charter, walked holding hands with his son to their new classroom at Brentwood Science, which had been stacked with balloons.
“When he saw his school burned on the news he was crying for days,” Koshki said of his child. “But when he heard that he was going to his new school with his old friends, he was so happy”.
Nina Belden, a parent of a Palisades Charter student who had made an emergency evacuation from her house in the Palisades with her family, said it was important for the students at her daughter’s school to stay together and receive in-person instruction.
“We were worried they were going to do something like remote learning,” said Beldon.
Marquez Charter, which also burned in the Palisades fire, has a long history in the community, having opened in 1955 when the Palisades still had a frontier feel, before the neighborhood became a favorite of Hollywood stars and media execs.
For Victoria Flores, who works as a paraeducator at Marquez, the school is part of her family. Flores went to Marquez when she was in elementary school, and her mother works in the cafeteria.
“It was my home away from home. We are devastated by what happened,” Flores said.
But Flores said she and the rest of the staff were glad to be relocated together at a LAUSD school called Nora Sterry, about ten miles from the burned Marquez campus.
“We are a really close family,” said Flores. “That’s helped us a lot.”
Upstairs at Nora Sterry, Clare Gardner’s class had about eight of twenty students show up on the first day of relocation.
Her third-grade class was playing with clay and Mrs. Gardner, who is a twenty-seven-year veteran of Marquez, held back her tears as she helped students arrive into class.
“We always call it the Marquez family,” Gardner said as the children greeted each other.
One boy in Mrs. Gardner’s class said he was happy to be around his friends and teacher but sad about his classroom fish and books, which were lost in the fire.
Later in the morning, LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went to visit parents at Nora Sterry.
After nearly a week off school, Carvalho says attendance is still below normal.
“I think where that attendance is lacking is in schools that were directly affected” by the fires, Carvalho said.
Also hurting attendance, Carvalho said, is the fact that many families are enduring temporary relocations, while others lack stable housing entirely.
LAUSD staff attendance is back to normal, he said, while student attendance is about 88% — down from an average of about 90%, representing about 10,000 fewer students than normal.
“As conditions of the families begin to normalize and stabilize, those [attendance] numbers will rise,” said Carvalho.
For other schools in other areas of Los Angeles, recovery may be longer in the making.
Bonnie Brinecomb, principal of Odyssey Charter School – South in Altadena, which burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire, estimates that the homes of 40% of the students enrolled in the school also burned.
Families and school staffers are scrambling to ensure displaced families have food, shelter and clothing, Brinecomb said. Some students are turning up for daycare at a nearby Boys and Girls Club that offered to take them in.
Brinecomb said Odyssey has partnered with McFeat’s school Aveson to search for new facilities. But the double loss of students’ homes and the schools’ campuses is a gutpunch.
“It’s just heartbreak. Pure shock,” she said. “You don’t even process how bad of a situation just happened.”
Like Aveson, Odyssey has launched an online fundraiser and Brinecomb says the school will rebuild. How long that will take, though, remains an open question.
From the perspective of displaced children and families, the faster things return to normal, the better, said Dr. Frank Manis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Southern California.
The experience of trauma can intensify if routines are disrupted for longer periods, and the intensity of the disruption matters as well, said Manis. Kids who lost their homes to fires may have a harder time bouncing back than those who only lost their schools, he said.
“It’s sort of on that spectrum of wartime PTSD, but not as bad,” said Manis. “So what it could lead to is nightmares, difficulty sleeping, and emotional or behavior problems that can last for quite a while.”
Children fighting post-traumatic stress from the fires may become withdrawn, or act out in class, said Manis. But mostly, he said, the research from past natural disasters shows that even children badly impacted by the fires may begin to feel normal within a few months.
“Kids are pretty resilient,” said Manis. “But trauma can disappear for a while, and then it can resurface later. When everyone’s forgotten how bad it was, it can resurface.”
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