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- Parents with children at schools near the Palisades and Eaton fire zones are worried it isn’t safe for their children to return.
- School district officials say that campuses have been cleaned and are safe, and are welcoming kids back.
- Pasadena Unified has reopened all of its 24 schools except for two charter schools.
Chris Dennis walked up Palm Street and down Lincoln Avenue in west Altadena, past charred husks of houses and cindered carcasses of cars.
The Eaton fire had destroyed his family’s nearby home, but his son’s school was still standing. And Dennis wanted to see it.
The route he took Jan. 25 was the same one he used each morning when he’d walk his kindergartner son to Odyssey Charter School. Now, though, “It’s just wasteland,” Dennis said.
“The wind picked up and I got ash in my eyes,” he said. “That school is downwind from a war zone.”
Dennis, 43, said he wasn’t prepared to have his son return to Odyssey. Far from it. He has many questions — about the scope of campus cleanup efforts and the results of environmental tests conducted there, to name just two. And Dennis isn’t alone.
At public meetings, on social media and in interviews with The Times, parents at schools near the Palisades and Eaton fire zones have expressed deep health and safety concerns, and questioned whether their children should return to class. But officials have assured parents that schools have been cleaned and are safe. Some campuses close to the devastation have already welcomed students back, including Canyon Charter Elementary School and Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Pacific Palisades, which together enroll more than 2,000 students.
At Odyssey, administrators acted on parents’ concerns: Unlike many schools in and around Pasadena, it has not yet opened.
“It’s just empty, desolate, strange. ... It is also the last place I can think of for kids to be,” said Michael G. Davis a parent at Odyssey who visited the campus after the fire. “The gate of our school is a five-minute walk from a square-miles-large, fresh, 100% toxic debris field. The notion of sending children into an area like that for whatever number of hours a day is insane.”
The Eaton fire destroyed five campuses in the Pasadena area, including Odyssey’s sister school. The Palisades fire claimed two elementary schools and badly damaged Palisades Charter High School. But campuses near fire zones — those with buildings intact, including Odyssey, Canyon and Revere — are grappling with safety issues that have vexed parents and administrators, complicated the reopening process and imbued it with tension.
Among the biggest concerns for parents: School district leaders — not an independent government entity — are responsible for ensuring their campuses are safe to reopen, according to county and state authorities. And there is no required remediation protocol for school properties that have been exposed to potentially toxic smoke, debris and ash generated by a fire.
Pasadena Unified, which had closed its 24 campuses on Jan. 8, has been reopening them in phases over the last two weeks, and brought the final group back Thursday, except for the Odyssey charter schools. The 14,000-student district, which marshaled 1,500 workers to clean the school sites, had said it wouldn’t bring back children until campuses were evaluated by an environmental testing company and confirmed safe. The company “conducted extensive tests at various locations within the affected school buildings,” assessing soot, char and ash, the district said.
Nearly two weeks after the Eaton fire forced Claire Robinson to flee her Altadena home, she returned, donning a white hazmat suit, a respirator and goggles.
L.A. Unified, meanwhile, has focused on deep cleaning schools and bringing in outside firms for inspections. Because of the district’s size, it has its own Office of Environment Health and Safety to add a layer of scrutiny. Reports on the seven most affected still-standing schools, among them Canyon and Revere, are posted on its website.
Parents said the lack of standardized processes for reopening is confusing, and many are agonizing over the decision to send their children to school. Some have been keeping their kids at home, arranging transfers to other schools and are even contemplating moving.
“We don’t know the answer, but I don’t think they do either,” said Negin Sohrabi, who has had two children at Canyon Elementary. “We’re not comfortable going back to the physical location of the school. So that’s not an option for us.”
What experts say
In an always-on culture — one in which harried parents are inundated with social media posts, group chats and town halls — it’s been hard for some to know which sources to trust for information about best practices after a fire.
“The whole ‘what is acceptable in terms of cleaning’ question is something I don’t feel confident in knowing,” said Mike O’Connor, a parent of a transitional kindergartner at Odyssey South, the Odyssey sister school that burned.
There are general guidelines published by county and state agencies on cleaning schools after a conflagration. Suggested steps include opening windows and doors to allow the smoke smell to dissipate; misting an area with water before wiping, sweeping or mopping to help prevent ash from going airborne; washing toys and carefully wiping those that can’t be submerged.
Some experts said that these guidelines underestimate the risk from smoke and ash, and that the toxicity and scale of L.A.’s recent fires demand a higher standard of care. The blazes incinerated plastics, metals, electronic components and building materials — including older, no-longer-permitted ones, such as asbestos, which is carcinogenic.
“Why isn’t a more thorough investigation being done to look for suspended particles that are too light to settle on surfaces and that are still of respirable size, small enough to get into your lower lung?” said Dawn Bolstad-Johnson, an industrial hygienist who has studied exposures in post-fire environments.
Nearly two weeks after the Eaton fire forced Claire Robinson to flee her Altadena home, she returned, donning a white hazmat suit, a respirator and goggles.
Many concerned Westside parents wanted the campus cleanups supervised by an on-site industrial hygienist — preferably one with a degree of independence who answered to an agency other than the school district.
That did not happen at Canyon and Revere. Instead, L.A. Unified hired environmental firms to review paperwork documenting the district’s actions.
The effort at Canyon was reviewed by hygienist Ibrahim M. Sobeih of Fullerton-based Titan Environmental Services, who wrote to the district: “Adequate cleaning was performed in areas where ash was observed, and filtration and deodorizers were utilized. No further action is recommended at the Site.”
Dr. Lisa Patel, executive director for the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and a pediatrician, said that in a disaster of this magnitude, it would be “difficult to come up with all the resources to be able to” have professional cleaners scour every space. She suggested accommodations that could help protect children, such as having them bring an extra set of clothes to school, so that they could change outfits if they were exposed to ash.
She noted that “younger kids are at higher risk because they have more hand-to-mouth behavior.” Older children, she said, can wash their hands well and are more easily taught to identify ash and avoid it.
But even handwashing would be complicated at Canyon, where the water is still not potable. Officials say it can be used only to clean hands if it’s completely unheated. Bottled water has been brought in for the school’s roughly 400 students.
Patel said she advised exercising “greater caution in the schools that were closer to the burn sites and have more ash.”
Palisades fire fallout
On Jan. 23, a staff geologist from Oakland-based Terraphase Engineering walked around Canyon Elementary, located over the hill from the Palisades burn zone, and carried out a test that would help determine whether children could return.
The geologist took a big sniff. He did not smell smoke.
That inhalation, described as an “olfactory inspection” in a letter Terraphase wrote to L.A. Unified, contributed to the reopening of a campus that escaped flames but still suffered an assault by ash, debris and smoke.
Before the sniff test, the work at Canyon mirrored cleaning that occurred at other affected schools, including Lanai Road Elementary School in Encino and Roscomare Road Elementary School in Bel-Air. Shortly after the fires began, the district sent its maintenance staff and outside contractors from campus to campus. Cleanup measures included changing air filters, mopping, sweeping and dusting. The district has also placed portable air purifiers in classrooms at some schools.
Campuses are safe, district officials have insisted in online presentations. As one slide at a meeting for parents said: “We feel confident about allowing a return to normal school operations, giving discretion to site administrators to pivot should conditions change.”
Canyon was lucky compared with Palisades Charter Elementary School and Marquez Charter Elementary School, two nearby campuses that mostly burned to the ground. But when it reopened Monday, many parents were unconvinced of its safety: Only 37% of Canyon’s students attended school, according to a district tally. Tuesday was a little better, with a rate of 52%.
Eight parent leaders at the school sent a letter to L.A. Unified’s Board of Education this week that demanded “third-party industrial hygienist testing, remediation, and ongoing air quality protocols.”
They were unhappy with a report shared by the district that detailed “visual and olfactory inspections.”
The report said a geologist found unsuitable conditions at Canyon during a Jan. 18 walk-through: “Smoke odor was noted upon entering all rooms in Buildings A, B, C, D, and Room 21 in Building F.” Five days later, a different geologist recorded no odor during his follow-up visit. Some ash had reappeared and was cleaned again. Still, parents who took part in a walk-through reported finding areas that they believed were inadequately sanitized.
The Revere campus reopened on Jan. 21, and students immediately reported that there was ash inside their lockers. Maintenance workers cleaned them the following weekend.
“Really?” parent Amir Guerami said. “Are school janitors at LAUSD schools and Paul Revere trained in EPA-compliant methods of cleaning toxic debris without causing more harm?”
Karmen Thulin, parent of a Revere sixth-grader, told L.A. Unified officials in an email that she was keeping her child home. She noted that no soil testing had occurred at the campus, which the district has acknowledged. “There is no mitigation effort or plan to keep those contaminants from being tracked inside, where they will definitely circulate among middle-school kids,” she wrote.
Attendance at Revere, which has about 1,700 students, was initially low, but has gradually improved, although that doesn’t mean all families are satisfied. Many have continued to raise concerns with officials, including about 100 who signed a letter to the school board.
Christine Kornylak’s daughter has returned to class despite the family’s misgivings. “She loves her friends and teachers, which is why I don’t want to give up and leave,” Kornylak said. “But we’re taking all the safeguards we can ... and are worried about what lies ahead.”
Opening in Pasadena
Odyssey and Odyssey South, independent charter schools that lease campuses owned by Pasadena Unified, remained closed Thursday while other schools welcomed back student after three weeks.
The district had offered space to Odyssey South — the school destroyed in the fire — on the same campus that houses Odyssey. When officials from the two schools held a town hall Jan. 23, it was clear that parents did not want their children returning to the site on West Altadena Drive anytime soon, said Bonnie Brimecombe, principal of Odyssey South.
“That property is literally on the burn line,” she said.
This week, Pasadena Unified released the results of environmental testing done at its properties, including the site housing Odyssey, which is flanked by the Eaton burn area on two sides. Those evaluations — completed by Orange-based EnviroCheck, the company hired by the district — included what it described as a “thorough assessment of potential contamination” that tested items including door handles, lobby desktops and cabinet tops.
The evaluation of the Odyssey campus was marked “non-detect” across 20 samples tested for soot, char and ash, meaning those items were “not found in a high enough concentration for the laboratory equipment to detect” them, according to the district. But parents at the Odyssey schools, which combined have about 840 students, weren’t sure what to make of the results.
“What’s the sustained cleaning plan? I am not seeing it,” Dennis said.
Pasadena Unified has said that it will monitor air quality daily using California Department of Public Health guidelines, and that airborne asbestos, lead and other toxic substances are being monitored by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Even before the town hall, officials at the Odyssey schools had been scouring the area for an another site. Carlos Garcia Saldaña, executive director of Odyssey Charter Schools, said in an email to parents Wednesday that administrators had secured venues to host both campuses’ elementary school students. But he said a place for middle schoolers had yet to be secured.
Some parents are unhappy with the decision to house both schools’ three youngest grades at a Boys & Girls Club on North Fair Oaks Avenue, about four blocks from a fire-scorched area. “My concern is that the Fair Oaks [location] isn’t really that far from the burn scar,” Dennis said. “So I feel like we have gone from one similar situation to another.”
In an interview, Saldaña acknowledged parents’ worries, but said that Odyssey leadership had settled on the best available option. “I hear the concern,” he said. “This is definitely makeshift.”
Saldaña said that the Fair Oaks property has been cleaned, but that he still needed to ascertain “what were the actual protocols, and who did the cleaning and environmental testing.”
The Odyssey schools will welcome students back Monday.
Times staff writer Jenny Gold contributed to this report.
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