When she got the news, Bonnie Brimecombe was standing on a sidewalk outside her in-laws’ house in Monrovia, where she had evacuated amid the chaos of last week’s fires. It was a video, sent by a colleague, showing the charred remnants of Odyssey South Charter School, where Brimecombe has been principal for three years.

Classrooms, desks, books, the owl murals, the fourth-graders’ quilt project, the newly planted native plant garden — all scorched by the Eaton Fire. Flames still lapped at one building, as the rest of the campus smouldered.

“It was gone,” Brimecombe said, choking back tears as she recounted the moment. “And then all the text messages from families started coming in. You’re just getting message after message, ‘My home is lost, I have nothing.’ The school didn’t even matter at that point. You just think about the families.”

Odyssey South, a popular TK-8 charter school in Altadena, was among the dozen or so schools destroyed in the Los Angeles fires. At least 40% of the school’s families and 10 staff members lost their homes. As of Friday, 5% of families were still unaccounted for.

Like at all the damaged schools, staff are navigating their own fire hardships while frantically scouring the city for new classroom space. Even as the fires continue to burn, the most important thing, they said, is to bring an element of normalcy to children whose lives have been upended.

Searching for a new school

As soon as she saw the video, Brimecombe and her staff “grieved for a few minutes” and then got to work looking for a new school. They’ve toured other school sites, churches, office buildings, even a vacant Bed Bath & Beyond. They’ve talked to real estate agents and countless property owners who’ve offered to help. 

But it’s not easy to find space for 375 students. The first hurdle is enrollment — Brimecome isn’t sure how many students will actually be returning to school once it reopens. Some evacuated to other counties or even other states, and it’s unclear how many will return, or when.

Another challenge is competition. There aren’t that many vacant spaces in the Pasadena area suitable for a school, yet there are at least five schools looking for space. Not all have the same needs, and they’re cooperating when they can, but there’s still not enough space for all the schools who need it.

The next obstacle is more practical. A vacant office building seemed perfect, but where would Brimecombe and her staff find hundreds of school desks and chairs? A nearby school offered to share its campus, but there wasn’t enough space for the entire student body so they’d have to split up — not a desirable option when students need continuity and to be with their friends, Brimecombe said.

And the final obstacle is money. Like many charter schools, Odyssey leases its campus from a school district. The school has insurance, but no control over the district’s plans to rebuild the site. The state and federal governments will provide some funding, but as an independent charter organization Odyssey is mostly on its own. It can’t raise money through a bond, and it lacks the staff to navigate the labyrinth of grants, permits and other paperwork. Although the school has launched an , staff aren’t sure how much money they’ll need or how much they can expect from various sources.

Odyssey isn’t alone. Los Angeles County has a high concentration of charter schools, and at least a half dozen were damaged or destroyed by the fires. Two charters near Odyssey – Pasadena Rosebud Academy and Aveson Charter School – not only burned down, but the principals also lost their homes.

Charter schools have a long road ahead as they wrangle with school districts and patch together money for rebuilding, said Keith Dell’Aquila, an advocate with the California Charter Schools Association who focuses on greater Los Angeles.

“For some schools, it’s total devastation,” Dell’Aquila said. “People who are leaders in their school communities also have no place to go at the end of the day, no place to put their kids to bed. It’s been unimaginable.”

His group is asking Pasadena Unified, which leases space to several damaged charter schools, to help find new space for those schools and to share funds from a recently passed pair of measures that are slated to bring in nearly $1 billion to district schools.

Pasadena Unified did not immediately respond to an email from CalMatters.

A ‘heartbreaking’ reality

Stacy Connor, head of Odyssey’s parent association, said the Eaton fire was the most terrifying experience of her life.  She and her family had to evacuate their home in Pasadena at 4 a.m., as 100 mph winds howled and flames roared a block away.

She and her husband and two children spent a few days at a church in Glendale before moving in with family for 10 days. Their house survived, but barely. Half the roof burned off, the siding was scorched and nearly all the contents were destroyed by smoke and ash.

Now, she’s spending her days haggling with the insurance company and replacing items lost to the fire. She’s also facing the “heartbreaking” reality that she may have to find a new school for her 9-year-old daughter. 

“Every single staff member at that school knew every single child. They truly loved children,” said Connor, who spent countless hours volunteering at Odyssey. “It was such an inclusive community where everyone felt welcome. I don’t know if we can replace that.”

Doubling down on mental health

Founded in 1999, not long after California legalized charter schools, Odyssey serves about 850 students on two campuses. (The other campus was not damaged in the fire). Odyssey South is ethnically diverse, reflecting the demographics of Altadena – about 30% Latino, 45% white and the rest a mix of Black, Asian and people who identify as more than one race. About a third are low-income. Students perform well above the state average in math and reading, and there’s typically a waiting list for enrollment. 

The school has a strong focus on social-emotional learning, an approach that will help students and staff recover from the trauma of the fires, Brimecombe said. Students are used to talking about their feelings, listening to their classmates and supporting each other. 

“In a way, we are ready for this kind of a situation. Resiliency is already built into our core values; we know how to come back,” Brimecombe said. “But it’s going to be tough. We’re going to need to double down to provide all the mental health support our students will need.”

The most immediate need was finding a place for students to go now. A few days after the fire, the local Boys & Girls Club offered to provide all-day care for the students, where they’ve been playing and talking and spending time together in a low-stress atmosphere. More importantly, parents can return to work and tend to insurance and rebuilding efforts.   

Within a week, the school planned a community event for families in San Gabriel, which is about 10 miles away but was less affected by wildfire smoke.

“We wanted to get everybody back to see each other’s faces. Have a minute to cry together,” Brimecombe said. “Some kids may have lost everything, but they could say, ‘My friend is still here, their mom is still here, my teachers are still here.’ It helps to understand, it’s not all gone.”

It was such a success the school is planning a second event, this time with resources like therapy dogs for students, mental health counselors, meditation sessions and representatives from the Red Cross, insurance companies and FEMA.

Meanwhile, Brimecombe and her colleagues hope to find a temporary campus and reopen within the next few weeks. The sooner students can get into a routine and resume learning, the faster their recovery will be, she said. She and her staff have been working 18-hour days, toiling through exhaustion and stress. 

“It’s just been full force forward ever since the fire, but it’s up to us, right?” she said. “We need to do it for the kids, because they can’t do it for themselves. They need to see our faces. They need to know that beyond this awful thing they’re going through, we know them and we’re there for them.”

This was originally published on .

In an instant, Blanca Carrillo and her daughter Aurys Hernandez lost everything.

Their home in Altadena was also the place they’d built a thriving daycare for young children. So when it burned in the , they were left homeless and without work all at the same time.

“Overnight our home and our livelihood is gone,” Carrillo said through a translator from a family member’s apartment in Arcadia.

It’s a disaster replicated thousands of times over, as many in L.A. County begin to confront how they’ll rebuild their lives after the fires. For childcare providers, this feeling is particularly acute: Many say they know that their work is critical to allowing families to find new housing or return to work.

But they’re also trying to figure out how they themselves will recover, or stay afloat at all.

“What we want is [to] continue working,” Hernandez said. “I need just a house … where I can have our daycare again.”

Crisis on top of crisis

More than 500 childcare spaces were in areas affected by the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires, . That’s almost 7% of all licensed childcare facilities in the county.

Some have already reopened, others await clean-up to clear all the debris, and some are gone entirely — refuges and second homes for some of the county’s youngest Angelenos turned to ash overnight.

Debra Colman, director of the L.A. County Office for the Advancement of Early Care and Education, said this comes as the childcare system in Los Angeles was already in crisis, with too few providers .

“We don’t have nearly enough licensed programs for all of the families in need,” Colman said, stating there are just under 8,000 facilities for more than 750,000 young children. (That’s almost 94 kids per facility.)

Homes and livelihoods lost

There is no one central childcare system. Instead it’s a patchwork of centers in living rooms, places of worship, educational centers and other spaces.

And all types of childcare have felt the effects of the fires. B’nai Simcha Jewish Community Preschool on the site of the . So did Altadena Children’s Center, which operated out of the now lost Altadena Baptist Church. Those centers both said that rebuilding will take time.

Shonna Clark, director of the Altadena Children’s Center, said around a dozen families with children at the center had also lost their homes.

“ So many of our kids have lost their home and their school. It’s absolutely terrible,” Clark said. “ We need safe places for these kids to be, and that’s all I’m concentrating on right now.”

B’nai director Carina Hu said that as families find new childcare, many are mourning the loss of the preschool’s strong community.

“ It’s really heartbreaking for the families,” Hu said. “It’s a catastrophe, and we’re just kind of spread out to the wind.”

What providers need now

Leslie Carmell with Options for Learning, an agency that works with childcare providers, said that the first priority in fire recovery is getting childcare providers into new homes.

“They need affordable housing. And as we all know, especially in SoCal, you know, ,” Carmell said.

Other questions about licensing, emergency financial support and other COVID-style aid all still lie ahead, according to multiple childcare experts.

“ Most of these programs operate on a razor-thin budget,” said Toni Boucher, the former director of Altadena Children’s Center. “Just like the government stepped in during COVID to provide relief funds for childcare programs to get them up and running again, we’re going to need that in a very big way with this effort as well to restore the number of spaces that have been lost across the community.”

The COVID-19 pandemic had a silver lining for childcare providers facing this current crisis: They are more connected now than they were before.

Susan Wood, the executive director of the Children’s Center at Caltech, said she and Boucher were part of a group that met weekly via Zoom during the pandemic. In the aftermath of the fires, they have implemented regular online meetings again.

Back at work

While some providers look toward rebuilding, others are focused on expanding capacity for families who need help as soon as possible.

Jodi Mason, who runs a daycare in her home in Pasadena, had to evacuate last week with some of the children she cares for in tow. But by Monday, she was back in her home, and her daycare was open. She has four new kids signed up because they’d lost their childcare to the fires.

“ It’s really been challenging because they’re out of their comfort zone. They love their childcare providers. They’ve been with them for years,” Mason said. “ Being taken out of your environment as a child is really devastating. … So I just try and give them as much love and attention that I can.”

K-12 senior reporter  contributed to this story.

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 . 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 , 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,  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, , which encompasses Altadena, and , 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.

, 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 , 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  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  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  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.” 

Carlos Garcia Saldaña drove past block after block of homes, businesses, and churches “wiped off the face of the earth.” The Eaton fire that had consumed large parts of Altadena was still burning in the San Gabriel Mountains. The charter network leader needed to see what remained of his schools.

As Garcia Saldaña approached Odyssey Charter School South, the facade and main entrance appeared intact. But as he looked left and up the hill, he saw a heap of twisted metal and charred rubble where, two days earlier, there had been classrooms, offices, lunch tables, play structures, and an after-school clubhouse. The tree stumps where students used to sit and eat and dream were still smoldering.

“It’s just jarring and heartbreaking,” Garcia Saldaña said.

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Over the past week, wind-whipped wildfires reshaped wide swaths of Los Angeles, and destroying more than 12,000 structures. A dozen or more . The danger is not yet past, with fires only partially contained and high winds forecast through Wednesday.

Hundreds of thousands of students were out of school last week as more than announced temporary closures due to poor air quality, shifting evacuation orders, and the many , , and who had lost their homes.

On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued suspending many state rules governing schools to make it easier for schools to operate in temporary buildings and for students to enroll across district lines, as well as waiving requirements about instructional days.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, a handful of schools in areas still under evacuation orders, including three that were neighborhood, remained closed early this week. The district announced that students from two ravaged Palisades elementary schools Wednesday from other district buildings on the city’s west side.

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified opened its Santa Monica campuses on Tuesday but kept schools in Malibu closed through Wednesday due to road closures and power and gas outages. Many local families have had to evacuate because of the proximity to the , and the district for affected families. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified also said it was monitoring air quality and that its facilities had air filtration systems in place.

In Pasadena Unified, the Eaton Fire, which started on Jan. 7, badly damaged five of its Altadena campuses, which housed a district middle school (whose student-led ), a defunct elementary school, and three charters, including Odyssey South, known as OCS South. Pasadena Unified said its schools will remain closed through this week but that it will offer self-directed online learning and grab-and-go meal service.

Close-knit community faces widespread losses

Now Garcia Saldaña’s days are consumed with checking on the many families and staff who lost their homes and looking for a space where students could return to school as soon as possible.

Odyssey operates two Altadena charter schools, OCS South and Odyssey Charter, the network’s original school, which sustained minimal damage — some downed trees and smoke residue. The charter network, founded in 1999, now serves a total of 830 students in transitional kindergarten through 8th grade.

OCS South opened its doors in 2018 and relocated to its current location, on the grounds of the former Edison Elementary School, three years ago. Since then, the Odyssey community has set out to make the campus its own — painting murals, planting gardens, and replacing old play structures.

Over the weekend, Garcia Saldaña sent a video message to families describing the damage to buildings at the two campuses. Odyssey Charter will require a major clean-up; the OCS South location was a near-total loss. But Odyssey isn’t about buildings, he said in the video, but about “the community that makes us such a special and unique place that we all love so much.”

Emmanuel Barragan, a father of three OCS South students, echoed that point as he dropped off his daughter and two sons at the Boys & Girls Club of Pasadena on Monday. School leaders know the name of every single child and what they need, he said, noting, “Sometimes, it almost feels like the school is a co-parent.”

Odyssey partnered with the Boys & Girls Club to offer free child care this week. The club also alerted other local schools that its doors would be open this week to any school-age child in need of a safe place to be. The clubhouse was providing all-day programming, including arts and crafts, sports, and educational games, and waiving its drop-in fee.

More than 200 students had arrived by mid-morning on Monday. Garcia Saldaña, better known to students as Dr. Carlos, was at the door to greet Odyssey families. He offered hugs as students made their way inside, and he checked in with caregivers about their housing status.

A survey of Odyssey’s roughly 650 families had yielded more than 300 responses, with 83 student households reporting “full loss of home & belongings.” Others said they didn’t yet know the condition of their home. Four Odyssey employees, including the Odyssey Charter principal, also lost homes in the fire, Garcia Saldaña said.

Altadena native Marcellus Nunley evacuated with his family around 3:45 a.m. on Jan. 8. Within hours, their home was gone. “Everything melted” was how his 5-year-old son, an Odyssey Charter kindergartener, put it. Nunley dropped off his son at the Boys & Girls Club so he could spend the day managing the logistics of a family displaced by fire: calling the mortgage company, reaching out to the county tax assessor, and procuring all of the little life necessities he hadn’t given much thought to until they went up in flames.

The losses are exacerbated by Altadena residents’ love for their neighborhood, with its charming bungalows and craftsman homes, picturesque hiking trails, and beloved local businesses. “Altadena is a diverse community, which is wonderful. It’s a walking community, it’s a dog walking community, it’s town and country,” Nunley said. “It’s a great melting pot of society.”

Before the Eaton Fire, about 42,000 people resided in Altadena. Many Black families who faced housing discrimination in other Los Angeles neighborhoods in the 1960s. Today, Black residents make up about 18% of the population. Roughly a third of Altadena residents are Hispanic, about 40% are white, and there are many Asian American and biracial families.

The Odyssey student body reflects the community’s racial diversity. It’s also economically diverse, with about 30% qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, according to Garcia Saldaña.

Caitlin Reilly’s two sons, 10-year-old Townes and 8-year-old Ellar, are students at OCS South. When the Eaton Fire forced another Odyssey family to evacuate early on Jan. 8, they drove to the house Reilly shares with her partner and kids, located in a section of Pasadena outside of an evacuation zone.

For the next four days, the four adults and four children huddled together in the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. The kids had an epic sleepover, and the parents stared at their devices, searching for the latest news about the fires engulfing Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Odyssey families connected on social media and text chains, offering up what they could and asking for what they needed, Reilly said. They arranged indoor playdates so kids could be together without breathing the smoke-filled air. They replaced baseball bats and gloves for Little League players who had lost theirs to fire, and they organized backpack and supply drives. The school launched a to support recovery efforts.

Fire’s devastation leaves uncertainty about next steps

The evacuated family’s Altadena house is still standing, but their badly damaged neighborhood remained under evacuation orders this week. They secured a temporary rental, but Reilly fears that many local families who lost homes will have a hard time finding a place to stay.

“The fear is that it will be like Katrina,” she said. The 2005 hurricane devastated New Orleans, damaged or destroyed , and . “We’re worried that we’ll lose so many families that are part of the community because there is nowhere to house them.”

That would hit Odyssey hard, given the closeness of its community and the fact that its funding is tied to its enrollment numbers.

“There’s been cheerleading about cleaning up and rebuilding, but as far as logistically what comes next, I don’t think anyone knows yet,” said Reilly, who serves on the Odyssey Charter Schools board.

Mary Scott, whose 10-year-old son, Charlie, attends OCS South, also fears dwindling enrollment at Odyssey. “The reality is, these aren’t all well-off families, and now they have to find a place to rent and rebuild while also having to pay their mortgages,” she said. “I do worry about the families that have to relocate. It would be a tremendous loss.”

Odyssey leadership acknowledges how much remains unknown: when schools will reopen in person, where classes will be held, how many families will stay local and how many will resettle elsewhere, and the extent to which the network will need to rely on remote learning.

Scott, for one, said she’s hoping to avoid remote learning because it was so difficult during COVID school closures when her son was in kindergarten and first grade. But if she had to choose between online schooling and leaving OCS South, she said would likely stay put because “I don’t want to abandon our community.”

Garcia Saldaña said the COVID years taught him a lot about what works for online learning (shorter lessons, movement breaks) and what doesn’t (asking kids to sit still for two to three hours at a time). But he’s mostly focused on finding a temporary physical location so students can return in person as soon as possible.

At the same time, he’s still figuring out the availability of Odyssey’s 115 employees, many of whom remain displaced, and asking teachers to reach out to each of their students.

“It’s about having a familiar voice on the other end of the line saying, ‘What do you need? How is your family?’” he said. “We are all human, first and foremost.”

This was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. .