Fire-damaged Palisades High goes online as students face COVID-style learning

Fifteen days after fire ripped through Pacific Palisades, destroying his house on Iliff Street and reducing a good part of his school to rubble, Jonathan Fuhrman pulled up to the kitchen table of his temporary Brentwood home, logged into his laptop and launched Zoom.

“Here we go again,” said the Palisades Charter High School senior, who spent most of middle school in virtual classes during the COVID-19 pandemic and started out high school wearing a mask and taking weekly coronavirus tests. “I wonder if people will be on camera.”

Fuhrman, 18, was one of thousands of students who found himself grappling with yet another historic disruption to his education: the Los Angeles wildfires. And his experience — one marked by uncertainty and suffering — was being replicated across the tight-knit Pali High community as most of the school’s roughly 3,000 students logged onto Zoom on Tuesday morning for the first day of online classes.

Like Fuhrman, many were nervous about teachers fumbling over technology and classmates not paying attention. Some were relieved to again have a daily schedule. Others figured they’d be counting the hours until the school day ended so they could go see their friends. And victims of the fire, which left many Pali students homeless, wondered how much it would come up in conversation — and whether they wanted to talk about it all.

Pali High student Daniel Fuhrman attended classes online Tuesday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“I’m not sure what to expect,” Fuhrman said before school started.

The Palisades fire, which roared across the coastal enclave starting Jan. 7, seriously damaged the high school, rendering it unusable for an indefinite period. Pali officials have said that they hope to soon find a temporary in-person location. But, in the meantime, students and teachers have returned to distance learning — which, for many, evoked a kind of dreadful déjà vu. It felt like spring 2020, when the pandemic forced school closures and classes online.

“I’m glad we’re back,” Fuhrman said. “But I’d rather be back in-person. I don’t know how soon that is going to happen before college.”

Zoom school is an option that several fire-damaged schools in Pasadena and Altadena have eschewed, citing students’ lack of interest in online learning, its ineffectiveness, and other factors.

Fire erupted at Pali High on Jan. 7.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

But Pali High needed to find a way forward with classes, however imperfect.

Nestled uphill from the Pacific Ocean along Temescal Canyon Road, Pali is an independently run charter school that rents its spacious campus from the Los Angeles Unified School District. As a charter it can move quickly to address its own problems. And local L.A. Unified Board of Education member Nick Melvoin has pledged that the district is committed to help.

“We will rebuild not with Pali High’s dime, but with L.A. Unified’s dime,” Melvoin said at a Jan. 15 town hall with families.

The goal is to secure a temporary venue for classes in four to six weeks, Pali officials said this week at a meeting of its board of directors. But they stopped short of making promises. Principal Pam Magee said the school is still tallying how many students were transferring to other schools.

Zane Lazar, a Pali junior, joined his first class on Zoom on Tuesday morning.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Assistant Principal Adam Licea noted some of the reasons to stay: Seniors would still get to have a prom and other milestone events. “I promise you that will be there,” he said at the town hall.

Fuhrman is looking forward to those activities. They could offer something close to normalcy for a student who is still putting his old life back together. While Pali was closed last week, he received an acceptance offer from Purdue University, one of his top picks.

“Usually who gets into college is what everyone wants to know at school,” Fuhrman said. “The fire changed that.”

Pulling a program together

Pali High’s administration had to scramble to piece together a distance learning program.

Some of the reopening issues were practical: Officials had to secure 250 computers for students who lost their school-issued devices in the fire. They ordered 100 mobile hot spots to provide internet access.

The retooling also required reimagining classes. On Tuesday, Fuhrman and his friends in AP Music Theory — who just a month ago performed a rendition of “Last Christmas” by Wham! in class — got a sense of how a course typically dependent on in-person instruction would be different. Their project for this week was to make Zoom presentations on music vocabulary.

Sports teams are offering some continuity — with relocation of practices and games. The wrestling team, for example, found space at a Brazilian jiujitsu studio in West L.A. Several others have returned to competition, among them the girls’ basketball team, which won its first post-fire game Jan. 15.

“The first day we had a gym to practice in I was there,” Ayla Teegardin, a member of the basketball team, previously told The Times. The junior lost her home in the fire. “… It’s a way I can cope.”

While waiting for classes to restart, Fuhrman and his friends, many of whom also lost homes, bonded over escaping a natural disaster. “This is not what we expected to be talking about,” he said, though the experience brought the group closer.

Fuhrman, his mother and his brother, Daniel, also a senior, moved into a new apartment in Santa Monica last week. Fuhrman was going to start Zoom school from there, but he had no furniture, so he stuck around at the ADU behind his dad’s Brentwood home for a little longer.

“It’s starting all over,” he said.

Pali student Zane Lazar said that after enduring virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, a return to online school felt like “déjà vu.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The first day online

Normally, on the day of a wrestling meet, Pali junior Zane Lazar would wear his team-issued blue-and-white warmups to school.

But on Tuesday morning, they were stuffed inside a bag near his bed, and he wore black sweatpants and a gray hoodie as he swiveled his Fuquido gaming chair to face his desk a little after 8 a.m. The clutter of a 21st century adolescence was arrayed in front of him: a Nintendo Switch, video game controllers, a school-issued laptop and a KN95 face mask his mother had given him. She’d been wearing one outside, said Lazar, 17, but he hadn’t been using it much.

“I’ve done enough of that already,” he said.

Lazar, who lives in the Beverly Grove area and attended Larchmont Charter School from kindergarten through ninth grade, enrolled at Pali for 10th grade because he “wanted a bigger campus” and a more traditional experience. The wrestling team quickly became an anchor for his school life.

After the fire, Lazar and his parents discussed the possibility of his enrolling elsewhere. But he was sure that he wanted to stay, citing the camaraderie among his teammates. “It’s gonna be weird, but I think we’ll adjust, and as long as we’re with everybody, that’s what’s most important,” Lazar said.

Still, his mother, Lizzy Weiss, said that she and her husband worried their son could spend his remaining time at Pali taking classes online. But she was reassured by the town hall.

“They’re going to be Pali kids together, instead of being the new kids on some campus [where] they don’t know anyone,” said Weiss, a writer and producer.

And yet even within Lazar’s family, the fire jumbled plans. His younger sister, Pali freshman Mimi Lazar, has decided to depart the school and enroll at the private New Roads School in Santa Monica. “She only had a few months” at Pali, Weiss said of Mimi. “So she didn’t have that strong connection.”

Before Tuesday’s schooling could begin, Zane Lazar had to face down an array of password prompts that stymied his initial efforts to log in to Zoom. Eventually, he called a friend to ask for help. “Bro, where the … are you?” the boy asked, using an expletive.

Lazar finally managed to log in to Zoom for his history class. Several other students in his first two classes also were late due to similar issues.

Juan Cotom-Lopez, left, and Jonathan Fuhrman attended Pali classes online on Tuesday from a home in Brentwood.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Throughout the morning there were regular reminders of the fire, including in Fuhrman’s AP Music Theory class. At one point, the teacher asked one of her students, “Do you have a drum set or anything at your house by any chance?”

“No, my house burned down,” he replied.

“I know. I know. But I’m saying, like, where you’re at now?” she asked.

“No, I don’t have anything,” the student said.

The teacher said she’d work on getting him an instrument.

A sense of ‘déjà vu’

Teachers shared cheery we’re-in-this-together messages in their opening remarks on Tuesday, and spoke with compassion about students who have lost their homes.

An educator who peppered her speech with “dude,” “man,” “you guys” and other familiar language offered warm closing remarks: “I love you so much.”

But a fact remained: This was Zoom school. And the tedium and the tech troubles — they were giving Lazar a bit of “déjà vu.”

He said the mechanics of the school day reminded him of COVID-era online education — as did a kind of apathy that he detected when he looked at the little tiles on his computer screen showing his classmates’ faces. “It doesn’t seem like people care,” he said.

Lazar said he remembered what it was like to be holed up in his room during the pandemic, trying to make it through day after day of middle school. The one plus: “I could get up five minutes before school started.”

Speaking at this week’s board meeting, Pali board member and teacher Maggie Nance said that “the vast majority” of her pupils had attended class, although officials did not release attendance numbers. She acknowledged how the situation was affecting students.

“I know from talking to kids today, there’s sort of hopelessness and fear,” Nance said. “They’re sort of traumatized by the COVID [schooling] that went on and on.”

But Lazar and Fuhrman were optimistic about school — to a point.

Zane Lazar said camaraderie among his teammates on Pali’s wrestling team was partly why he wanted to stay at the school.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“I was expecting online school to go worse,” Fuhrman said at the end of the day. “Maybe because we are seniors and a lot of the kids seem to know each other better. It felt different than COVID. … But being on Zoom, it’s still harder to interact with friends and peers.”

Lazar agreed that the situation felt different from the pandemic in a key way: “The main thing that sucked about COVID was you couldn’t see each other [in person]. That’s not the case here.”

Indeed, the junior had something to look forward to after school on Tuesday — a wrestling meet against Encino Crespi. And Pali won.

“I wasn’t really thinking about the fires,” Lazar said. “It didn’t seem like anyone was focused on that — they were focused on winning. It just felt normal.”