Thousands of children have been victimized by the Eaton and Palisades fires. Some have seen their homes destroyed by the fires. Others have been evacuated for weeks or potentially months. Others have seen their schools burn down.
In Altadena, one traditional public school was devastated by the fires, Eliot Middle School, along with three charter schools and two private schools. In the Palisades, two elementary schools (Palisades and Marquez) were destroyed, as well as at least two private schools. The local public high school—Palisades Charter High School—suffered damage to 40% of its campus and likely won’t be able to re-open for years.
With so many children dealing with trauma (and still recovering from the emotional and educational challenges of the pandemic), it’s an ideal time for school districts to step up and open their doors to students in need. Now is the time for districts to relax their normally strict residency requirements in order to be good neighbors to families affected by the fires.
Look, for example, at the La Cañada Unified School District (LCUSD), which is located just to the west of Altadena. La Cañada has three high-performing elementary schools in which over 80% of the children can read at grade level. These would be ideal schools for displaced Altadena children to attend, as they are all within minutes of the burn area of the Eaton Fire. Paradise Canyon School, in fact, is just blocks away from the western edge of the burn zone.
All three of these schools have space for additional students. Data from the California Department of Education shows that each school has seen enrollment decline in recent years. La Cañada Elementary has at least 32 available seats, Palm Crest Elementary has at least 73 available seats, and Paradise Canyon has at least 89 seats. The high school, which serves grades 7-12, has at least 53 empty seats that could be filled by children affected by the fire.
Any of these schools would be a better option than the struggling schools within the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD). The nearest PUSD middle school to Eliot, for example, is Octavia Butler Middle School, where only 25% of students are reading at grade level. For many children in the fire zone, La Cañada High is actually the closest school that serves students of their age level.
hiring investigators through the Burbank company Frasco. These private eyes spy on children in order to determine who is or isn’t living within the district’s strict attendance boundaries. Children who live outside the boundaries are expelled. In addition, the district tasks administrative staff with conducting Soviet-style “residency checks,” or—as district staff called them in one internal memo—“bed checks.”
These policies can be traced to the very founding of LCUSD. La Cañada students once attended Pasadena schools, including John Muir High School in neighboring Altadena. But those Pasadena schools were soon to be desegregated after the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Six years later, La Cañada voted to secede from the Pasadena school district. It has been one of the wealthiest—and most exclusionary—school districts in the state ever since. To this day, only 5% of the studentscome from low-income families, and fewer than 14% are black or Hispanic, despite the district’s location just minutes away from diverse, working-class communities in Altadena.
raising over $128,000 to help them. I suspect that the community’s goodwill could very easily be expanded to include additional families affected by the fires.
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As so many communities and institutions have been welcoming and generous in this extraordinary time of crisis and need, we should expect the same from our public schools.
Tim DeRoche is the president and founder of Available to All, a nonpartisan watchdog that defends equal access to public schools. He is the author of A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools.
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