Less than a month after wildfires devastated southern California – destroying eight schools across the Los Angeles area – districts are taking steps to rebuild and recover.
On Tuesday, Los Angeles unified school district superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced the district will direct $2.2bn toward efforts to repair or rebuild three schools damaged in the Palisades wildfire, and renovate all the districts’ campuses to be more “natural disaster resilient”. The funding – which has been set aside from a $9bn bond that voters approved in November – includes $725m to reconstruct the almost entirely destroyed Palisades and Marquez elementary schools, and Palisades Charter high school, which was about 30% destroyed.
Students from the two elementary schools have been relocated to other schools, while charter school students are attending classes online. Carvalho predicts that those students will be able to return to newly constructed campuses in 2028 but may be able to attend classes in portable classrooms at the same locations in the meantime if environmental testing and debris removal go smoothly.
The district is also directing funding to prepare its other campuses for the threat of future natural disasters.
“We need to accelerate these projects to ensure that our facilities are resilient to what no doubt will be atmospheric conditions, fires that will threaten our school system and our community,” said Carvalho, who noted the district is directing $200m into seismic retrofitting and asking for air purifiers and outdoor sensors for air quality particulate matter.
Meanwhile, Pasadena unified school district superintendent Elizabeth Blanco told CBS Los Angeles on Monday that the district is still in the “recovery” phase, and focused on relocating students whose campuses were destroyed by the Eaton fire to other schools or online classrooms.
“We were not required to do environmental testing, but out of an abundance of caution, we did environmentally test each of the schools. The cleaning and sanitizing process was quite extensive,” she said. “We had 1,500 workers on the ground supporting our maintenance and operations team, cleaning the schools, sanitizing them and testing them to make sure that children were all coming back to safe environments.”
Still, five campuses in the district were destroyed: Eliot Arts magnet middle school, Franklin elementary and the Edison, Loma Alta and Noyes charter elementary schools. The district has resolved to rebuild Eliot, but it is not yet clear what the budget or timeline for that or other repairs will be.
In the meantime, Blanco said, Eliot students have been relocated to another middle school, where they are still functioning as a separate school in an attempt to retain the school’s identity.
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