Wildfires devastated the Los Angeles community of the Pacific Palisades that night, destroying homes and businesses, transforming a neighborhood forever. Palisades Charter Elementary was among three schools that burned there. 

Palisades Charter Elementary has since moved to a temporary home at a school in Brentwood, while L.A. Unified executes a multi-year plan to replace its ravaged Palisades campus. 

In an interview with LA School Report, Herman shares how she’s keeping her school community together amid the loss and trauma of the worst wildfires in the city’s history.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What did the burning of your school community and your school’s campus in January mean for the individual members of the community?

I remember thinking on that night, ‘I don’t know how to be the principal of a school that’s burned down,’ because that’s not actually in the principal playbook anywhere. They don’t teach you that in principal preparation school. 

I don’t actually know how many members of my school lost their homes. However, anyone who lived up in the Palisades has been displaced, and their lives changed inexorably since that moment. 

It certainly has changed all of us and brought us together in a really unique way.

How are your students and staff reacting to life at Brentwood Science Magnet (school) where your school was relocated after your original campus burned? 

It’s been a really great place for us to land. The students are very happy to be together. They’re very happy to be with their teachers. That’s really critical. They’re having a lot of fun. 

We didn’t have tetherball at our old school, so tetherball is a big hit. And the fact that the students get to just enjoy this great space is kind of amazing. 

So it’s been really joyful to watch the students interact with one another and process what’s been going on, and be together. 

Immediately after the school burned down and you knew that students wouldn’t be able to return very soon, did they immediately go to Brentwood Science Magnet? Or was there a period of online school or other transition?

The school was lost on the evening of January 7, and by the Friday of that week, I knew that we were coming to the Brentwood Science Magnet school. 

We had Monday and Tuesday of the following week for teachers to prepare, and on Wednesday, March 15, we opened our doors for students. 

So there was no online school. There was no real loss in continuity. I knew that when we had a return, it would be a rolling return because families were trying to organize themselves.

Do you think that’s led to the community staying together more easily than if there were a period of online learning? 

I think it has had a hugely positive effect on our community, and it has really been instrumental in laying the foundation for the healing process. We are not suddenly all better, but I think in-person learning really did provide continuity for kids.

How do you keep displaced families from leaving the school?  

On January 6, our enrollment was, I think, 406 students. And as of today, it’s about 350 students. I know that we lost a good number of students who moved out of the area pretty immediately. 

Then, there were a number of families who were displaced and unable to return. 

And then there are some other families who we’re in conversation with regarding their personal situations, and providing them options. 

How are you addressing trauma?

Students are still experiencing trauma. Teachers are still experiencing it. For all of us, we lost our school. This is a very, very, very significant event.  

The district has been wonderful about providing mental health support. We have several partnerships that we are working on and extra personnel from the district who have that background that can really support students, not just in this moment, not just for the next few months, but in the years to come.

How has this whole ordeal of the fire and relocating impacted academics and attendance?

We don’t really know yet about the impact for students. We’re preparing to take state tests, and we’re monitoring students to ensure they have support. I have an amazing faculty, and they are adapting and adjusting their instructional practices. 

In terms of attendance, this is a moment, again, where our old playbook is not really applied any longer. I know the district has been very focused on making sure students come to school. 

We do pretty well. We’re at about a 90% daily attendance rate. Sometimes we’re super flexible about when students arrive, because they may be coming from one place last week and a different place this week. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’m super proud of the way that we have come together as a community. I’m super proud to work with Los Angeles Unified [School District] and have their support in addressing this crisis in a very thoughtful and careful and fast way to ensure that our students have a safe place to go to school. 

I’m happy to be at the Brentwood Science Magnet campus, and I look forward to whatever our next steps are. 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

But that hasn’t stopped the school’s student choir from making music. In fact, they just sang at the show last month, with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock.

Classes are still virtual for students of after wildfires scorched the school’s campus in January. The student choir meets virtually for rehearsals, and occasionally in person. 

Recovering from the fires that burned the school and destroyed homes and buildings in the surrounding community has been difficult, said choir director Allison Cheng. 

Students and staff are still reeling from the losses, she said, but singing helps transform the trauma from the disaster into a healing experience.

“It was something that the whole community could look forward to that was positive,” said Cheng of the Grammy appearance. 

See the Palisades High School choir at the one minute mark:

Stevie Wonder performs “We Are The World Michael Jackson at the Grammy Awards

Pali High, as the school is called by students and staff, is known for famous alumni such as will.i.am and J.J. Abrams, as well as for being the filming location for movies such as Freaky Friday and Teen Wolf.����

Cheng said the choir’s journey to the Grammy Awards began on January 17, when she got a text out of the blue from the event’s organizers, asking if she would be interested in working on a performance at the televised award show. 

The choir’s performance, which was kept under wraps until the award show took place, aimed to highlight students from schools affected by the recent LA wildfires, such as Pali High. 

Working with the show’s organizers, Cheng reached out to a friend at the Pasadena Waldorf School, and asked that school’s choir to join for the show. 

“I don’t even know how many emails I sent back and forth with production to make sure we had everything,” said Cheng. “It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.” 

The two schools’ choirs finally met for an in-person rehearsal on Saturday, Feb. 1 with country singer Lamont Van Hook to record a backing track for the performance. 

Their shining moment came the next day during the Grammys when both of the student choirs joined Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock at the star-studded award show for a rendition of “We are the World” as part of the ceremony’s tribute to Quincy Jones. 

Joining the musical legends onstage, the students wore shirts that read “I Love LA” as they sang backup accompanied by a jazz ensemble. 

Another high point for the students came when they got to meet some of their idols backstage at the event, including Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter, Cheng said.

The experience lifted kids’ spirits at a tough time for them at school, Cheng said. Online learning is tough, she explained, especially in music programs like hers. 

“Because I’m not in the room, we can’t physically hand them something to show me,” said Cheng. “It’s really difficult.”

Many Pali High students use music as a safe outlet for expression, Cheng said, and the trauma of the fires has only heightened the importance of artistic education in their lives. 

That’s why singing at the Grammys was so sweet for the students, she said. 

“These are kids that not only sing in choir, but they dance, they produce music, that’s what they want to do,” said Cheng. “So this experience was priceless for them.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

It’ll be a while before Los Angeles can fully assess the damage to its schools from this recent spate of fires, but a few things already seem certain: rebuilding will take a long time, it will be expensive, and it may sap the statewide fund for school repairs.

At least a dozen schools in the Los Angeles area have been damaged in the fires, including at least five that were destroyed completely. Thousands of students and school staff have lost their homes, and countless families are grappling with major disruptions to their day-to-day lives. 

“The pain of being evacuated, losing your home, or having family and friends who have been impacted. … it’s just so devastating,” said Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools. “At so many districts in our county, the superintendent themselves has been evacuated, or 50% of the staff has been evacuated. And meanwhile they’re all trying to help their students.”

In Pacific Palisades, fires destroyed two elementary schools and extensively damaged Palisades Charter High School. Fires in Pasadena and Altadena destroyed three elementary schools. Several others in greater Los Angeles remain closed because they’re in evacuation zones or have been damaged.

Students at those schools have been reassigned to other campuses, are learning online or are waiting for conditions to improve so they can return to class.

For many students, it will be a long wait. Even with loosened regulations, rebuilding a school could take years as officials piece together a hodgepodge of funding sources: insurance money, private grants and donations, local bonds, lawsuit settlement money and state and federal funds. Some districts will have plenty of funding options, while others will struggle to find enough revenue.

In the meantime, some will have immediate expenses such as procuring portable classrooms and hiring mental health counselors to help students, staff and families cope with trauma. Large districts such as Los Angeles Unified can reallocate resources quickly, but smaller districts and charter and private schools face more obstacles.

Big demand for Prop. 2 funds

Proposition 2, the $10 billion school construction bond approved by voters in November, will be a big help for schools that need to rebuild or make costly repairs, or even buy portables. 

The state allocates the money to schools with the highest need, and then on a first-come, first-served basis. There’s already a big backlog of schools that have applied for money, and it’s likely that schools gutted by fire will get priority over those with less urgent needs, said Rebekah Kalleen, a legislative advocate for the Coalition for Adequate School Housing. 

That means some schools will miss out. Because California’s fund for school repairs had been empty for a while, there’s a long list of schools with critical repair needs. Throughout the state, students are attending schools with leaky roofs, lead pipes, unsafe electrical systems and broken air conditioning. Schools in low-income and rural areas are most affected, because they have less ability to raise money through local bonds.

Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keyes Union School District south of Modesto, said he has empathy for those dealing with buildings destroyed or damaged by the fires in Los Angeles, but he worries about . The 1,000-student district, which primarily serves low-income students whose parents work in the nearby agricultural fields, desperately needs money to replace the 40-year-old roof, upgrade the electric wiring and make other safety improvements.

“There is a growing concern that Prop. 2 funds will be quickly depleted, leaving smaller districts like Keyes struggling to address our own long-term facility needs,” Brasil wrote in an email. “We understand the moral imperative to support the devastated districts first, but the reality is that districts like ours cannot be left behind in the process.”

Brasil and other superintendents are asking for the state to balance the needs of schools affected by fires with those that aren’t, and provide extra money if possible. Gov. Gavin Newsom last week promised to chip in an extra $1 million from the state’s general fund for schools damaged by fire.  

‘Like a bomb had gone off’

The post-fire experience in Sonoma and Butte counties provides a preview of what lies ahead in Los Angeles. Thousands of homes and numerous schools were destroyed in a spate of fires from 2017-20, leaving residents to resurrect entire communities.

“Those first few weeks were surreal, almost primordial. It was like a bomb had gone off,” said Andrew Bailey, head of Anova Center for Education, a private school in Sonoma County that serves special education students enrolled in public schools. Anova was destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, leaving its 125 students without a campus.

There was no school at all for three weeks while staff hunted for classroom space at other locations. Eventually they brought in portables and launched an ambitious fundraising campaign to pay for a new school. Last week, the new school finally opened — more than seven years after the fire.

“It was miraculous that we were able to do this,” Bailey said. “It was incredibly hard work, but now the headwinds have dissipated and our kids now have a great new school.”

Attending school at a hardware store

In Paradise, a Butte County town which was nearly entirely destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, the school district is still recovering. Four school sites were destroyed and nine were extensively damaged. A big obstacle in rebuilding, school officials said, was not knowing how many students to expect. More than 80% of the town burned down, and it was unclear how many residents planned to move back. Enrollment in Paradise Unified dropped from 3,500 before the fire to 1,500 in 2019. It’s now up to 1,700. 

Although the state was helpful, the paperwork and funding process took time, Superintendent Tom Taylor said. Meanwhile, students attended school any place officials could find space: other school districts, some 20 miles away; warehouses; even a hardware store. (The store was cleared of merchandise. Students ate lunch at the check-out counter.)

The district has so far spent $155 million to rebuild campuses, but needs $150 million more to fix everything that needs fixing, Taylor said. The district is hoping to break ground on Paradise Elementary School, one of the schools that was completely destroyed.

“There were a few years where all staff worked harder than we ever have. Long days, seven days a week, no time off,” Taylor said. “We’re still not done. … But our staff understands that schools are the center of a community, and we want our schools to help lead the return of the town.”

Prioritizing mental health

In some ways, Los Angeles schools will have it a bit easier than those in Sonoma and Butte. The state now has well-established disaster relief protocols, and there are plenty of experts who can advise. Because of COVID-19, most schools already have distance learning systems in place and robust social-emotional support for students. 

Support for mental health – for staff as well as students – is a crucial piece of recovery, school officials in Sonoma and Butte said.

In Sonoma County, schools learned early on how to screen students for anxiety. They also created partnerships with local nonprofits and health clinics, and the County Office of Education trained teachers to lead class discussions and otherwise support students who felt traumatized by the fires.

“In situations like this, you’re never going to have enough money for one-to-one counseling for everyone who needs it,” said Mary Champion, a school psychologist with the Sonoma County Office of Education. “That’s why it’s so important to train educators, to take some of the pressure off clinicians.”

Tyson Dickinson, director of the office’s Department of Behavioral Health and Well-Being, said districts in Los Angeles should expect the recovery process — beyond the replacement of buildings — to take a long time. Sonoma County’s last major fire was in 2020, and it’s still never far from residents’ minds.

“Any time it’s windy, warm and dry, any time there’s smoke, you can see the stress building,” Dickinson said. “From August through January everyone is on edge. It’s just a different world now.”

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.

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. .