When fire erupted in Pacific Palisades on a Tuesday morning in January, Hilary Cannon rushed to Palisades Charter Elementary School. Howling winds were pushing the blaze toward her daughters’ campus.
She rounded up her three girls and six of their friends, secured them in her car, two to a seat, along with her mother and preschooler, and drove away from the school for the last time.
By Tuesday night, the Palisades Fire had burned the campus to the ground. Cannon’s home was gone, as were the homes of dozens of students and teachers.
“There were so many people who would be like, ‘Just be strong for your kids.’ I don't know how you can be,” Cannon tells KCRW from the home where her family is staying in southern Orange County. “I just sobbed with them, all together. Multiple times.”
Even as the school burned, Los Angeles Unified School District moved quickly to identify campuses that could accommodate the Palisades elementary community in its entirety. Simultaneously, they looked to accommodate Marquez Charter Elementary, another Palisades school that burned.
One week later, well before the fire was contained, hundreds of traumatized Palisades Charter Elementary students showed up to the campus of Brentwood Elementary Science Magnet, five miles east of the Palisades.
The school in Brentwood has by all accounts been welcoming, gracious and eager to help. But not all their feelings have been positive. As hundreds of families adjust to the reality of their shared campus, tensions that play out across Los Angeles’s huge and diverse school district are manifesting here, too, insiders say: cultural differences, discomfort, and a fear of being left behind.
About 250 students attend Brentwood Elementary Science Magnet, and 410 students attend Palisades Charter Elementary School. Photo courtesy of LAUSD.
When the Palisades Fire destroyed thousands of structures, it also decimated a way of life that’s exceedingly rare in Los Angeles.
Cannon, who rented her home there, calls the Palisades “a bubble.”
“All your kids go to the same dance studio. They all do the same book clubs, and soccer. And you join a basketball league one year and a couple of the kids on the team are who you did a-mommy-and-me class with five years ago,” she explains. “People don't leave the Palisades.”
When her neighborhood disappeared, Cannon was reeling. She didn’t want to lose every aspect of her community, too. She reached out to her daughters’ school principal with a plea.
“We have to stay together,” she said.
Juliet Herman, Palisades Charter Elementary School principal, didn’t see any other alternative.
“Children lost homes,” she says. “We lost our school. The only thing we have is each other, and we have to be together.”
When her daughters were ready to return to school, Cannon drove them 75 miles from southern Orange County to the unfamiliar Brentwood Science Magnet. Her school community had been given its own building there, as well as a dozen or so bungalows.
Her kindergartener, Eloise, was nervous about the transition, so Cannon walked her into class. There, she saw familiar faces. Eloise’s teacher and classmates were sitting on a rug in a circle, passing around a big squishmallow and talking about their feelings.
“We’re in the right place,” Cannon said to herself. “The school is what is keeping us all together.”
But if Cannon felt a sense of community restored as her kids’ school was reconstituted, some other families on this same campus worried about being pulled apart.
“We've got two completely different school communities,” says Brentwood Principal Reginald Brunson. “We pride ourselves on our ethnic diversity and economic diversity.”
While a majority of Palisades Charter students are white and few are low-income, a majority of students at Brentwood Science Magnet are Latino, Black, and low-income.
And Brentwood is not a school where students live in a neighborhood “bubble.” Brunson says 90% of them bus to their campus from other parts of the city.
"Our parents fit in where they can, especially given a lot of our parents are full-time professionals who are busy and don't necessarily live near Brentwood,” says Dominique Reese, president of the Brentwood Science parent-teacher organization. “We're still learning how to be cohesive, partly because a lot of our parents – we don't live near our school.”
When Reese first read online that Brentwood Science Magnet would be opening their doors to hundreds of students burned out of Palisades Charter, she felt a lot of goodwill.
“It just seemed like the most gracious gesture,” Reese says. “I was reading in the comments and they were very warm, and welcoming, and affirming.”
Students from Brentwood Science made welcome signs for the newcomers.
“You hear about a school burning down, and your heart just breaks,” says Brentwood Elementary parent Matt Emery. “Initially, you feel like, okay, whatever I can do to help, right?”
But early big changes gave some parents pause.
Brentwood Science Magnet had to give up a dozen classrooms to Palisades Charter, according to Principal Brunson, including rooms for speech, music and art instruction.
Some Brentwood teachers were moved from their classrooms over the weekend, with little notice. Parents say they saw new furniture and maintenance crews coming in to paint and do electrical work – but not on their side of the school.
Other Brentwood parents struggled to adapt to sharing the campus with Palisades parents. Emery, whose son is a kindergartener, felt that the new parents were acting entitled during school pick-up and drop-off.
“Not to judge anybody, but it's just the behavior of, ‘I can park where I want. I can use whichever entrance I want.’ Like, no, you got to follow the rules,” he says. “Anytime I'm a guest … I make sure I'm as humble and respectful and grateful as possible.”
Emery started getting anxious about tensions escalating between the two school communities, which he says come from “different worlds.”
“Nobody wants to say there's the potential for any racial tension, but there is the potential for racial tension,” he says. “I feel sad saying that,” he adds. “I want everyone to get along.”
Members of the Palisades elementary community say they are very grateful to have been welcomed by the Brentwood Science community, and to have the opportunity to heal together.
“We are very lucky to have landed here,” says Palisades Charter Principal Juliet Herman. “We feel very blessed to have such a gorgeous space and such a welcoming school to have brought us in, and really brought us back to life.”
To address the tension brewing in his school community, Brunson hosted a town hall for Brentwood Science parents, as well as a lunch for teachers, to hear their concerns.
“Are we going to be displaced?” wondered Brentwood Science parent Dominique Reese. “Is there a long-term vision for them to take over our school? Will we be pushed out of our school?”
“The Brentwood community wanted to make sure that they were not pushed to the side, or that they were not pushed to the back of the bus,” says Brunson.
He assured his community that maintenance upgrades were happening equitably across the entire campus.
“The goal was to make sure our teachers – and everyone in Brentwood – know that our school exists, that we weren't closing, that we weren't getting pushed out, and that we weren't going to be left behind,” he says.
It’s an ever-present fear for shrinking schools, as Los Angeles Unified loses students.
Enrollment at Brentwood Elementary Science Magnet is 250 students – a fraction of what it was a decade ago. Meanwhile, 410 students attended Palisades Charter Elementary (at least 50 Palisades families have told their principal they will not be back for the rest of the school year).
Schools like Brentwood Science Magnet have been losing the competition for students to schools like Palisades Charter for years, which is part of the reason there’s room on their campus for another school.
Brunson says enrollment at Brentwood Science has started to rebound, but attracting families from the nearby Brentwood neighborhood has been a struggle.
“We do have people come on our tour and are surprised by the demographics of our student population. They hear the word ‘Brentwood’ and they think a certain thing, and then when they come here and see something else – I don't know – they're not comfortable,” he says. “They don't think our students are as smart or are good.”
Now, Brentwood Science may have to compete for students with a high-performing school on its campus.
“I hope … we're not getting an influx of parents because they want to be on one side of campus and ignore the campus that has been here traditionally.”
Los Angeles Unified School Board Member Nick Melvoin says Palisades Charter will stay at Brentwood Science Magnet, and Marquez Charter will stay at Nora Sterry Elementary, where they are similarly sharing a campus in the Sawtelle neighborhood, through at least the end of the academic year.
“Long term, the [Pacific Palisades] parents have my commitment that we're going to rebuild, and there will be schools back in the Palisades,” he says.
But construction there could take several years. In that time, families who have lost their homes and schools may choose to move, or send their children elsewhere.
Melvoin says that if hundreds of students leave Palisades Charter and Marquez Charter, the district may consider reducing the number of shared campuses from two to one.
He suggests the possibility of moving the Marquez community to Brentwood Science Magnet next year, which he says would ease administrative challenges for the district.
“We will engage the Brentwood community before decisions are made about next year, to understand their feedback and their perspective,” he says.