After the catastrophic Eaton fire tore through her community, Altadena resident Amanda McPhillips moved her children out of the Pasadena Unified School District to New York public schools when the family relocated cross-country to stay at a friend’s home.
Now, more than two months later, the future for where her children will go to school come next fall is unclear.
Her oldest was in kindergarten at Aveson School of Leaders, a PUSD charter school that was pummeled by the fire. She said it’s not clear where Aveson will even be located next school year, making the decision about what to do difficult.
“I think it’s just a lot of unknowns and just kind of waiting to see what happens,” McPhillips said.
She’s not alone.
As the fire-weary Pasadena school district — many of its campuses damaged and already dealing with a persistent pattern of enrollment declines — looks simply to get through the rest of this year, there are already questions about what many families will do come fall.
Will the thousands displaced by the fire come back to the district? Many landed in neighboring cities and counties. And others, like McPhillips, found refuge out of state.
They are contemplating whether to come back. And the beleaguered district, which suffered damage to six campuses in the fire, and saw many of its staff and students suffer devastating loss, is also contemplating the future.
McPhillips said she is understanding of the district’s challenges, because of the unprecedented nature of the crisis and multiple factors at play.
“As someone who didn’t lose their home, I’m incredibly grateful, but I’m also understanding what a huge impact losing your school is and how that really can displace you in a way almost as much as losing your home can, because it’s your everyday life when you have kids and it’s your community,” McPhillips said.
Pasadena Unified School District officials said it’s too early to predict what enrollment levels will look like for the 2025/26 school year. Officials said they are encouraged by a commitment from the state that it won’t be penalized financially, at least in the short term.
In normal times, though, the stakes are high when it comes to enrollment. State funding for public schools is tied to enrollment numbers. But there is a state mechanism in place that applies when schools close often due to natural disasters.
Chief Business Officer Saman Bravo-Karimi said PUSD uses an enrollment and attendance calculation, known as average daily attendance (ADA) from before the fire and closures to determine the enrollment basis for funding this school year and next.
Complicating matters have been patterns of declining enrollment that long preceded the fire.
Overall, PUSD’s enrollment has declined from more than 17,000 students in 2014/15 to around 13,700 students on census day in the 2024/25 school year. The district said the average decline per year has been approximately 2% during the last 10 years.
That pattern culminated in a difficult night on Feb. 27, when the district’s governing board – citing years of declining enrollment, expiration of one-time COVID-19 relief funds and rising costs – approved cuts to 151 positions.
PUSD Board President Jennifer Hall Lee said she doesn’t want to lose anyone from the district, but that those who have relocated are still part of the district’s family and would be welcomed back.
“The board and the staff are working through a disaster for which there is no roadmap,” Hall Lee said in an email statement. “However, this is an opportunity for us to rebuild and restore with a vision for the future so that all students are successful and proud of being in the PUSD.”
Hall Lee said it was too early to get into specifics about what rebounding from the fire will look like but that conversations will be taking place over the next several weeks and months.
At last month’s Board of Education meeting, the district talked through alternatives for students from five of the schools damaged or destroyed by the fire. Students at Eliot Arts Magnet, Altadena Arts Magnet, Aveson School of Leaders, Odyssey Charter School-South and Rosebud Academy have been relocated to other campuses.
According to the district, Altadena Arts Magnet students, who have been relocated to the Allendale campus, are expected to be able to return to their home campus by the beginning of the 2025/26 school year.
Parents urged the board to not send their children back to the campus until after debris removal has been completed at the properties surrounding the school.
Eliot will be co-locating with McKinley through the 2025/26 school year, the district announced.
The fire has also impacted the schedule for the district’s bond projects. Franklin, which was meant to serve as a swing space during Madison’s modernization project, suffered substantial damage and won’t be ready for the new school year meaning Madison’s project will be delayed.
Like McPhillips though, PUSD parents have already begun leaving the district amid the losses of the Eaton fire.
Reasons vary. Some of the displaced simply had to go where they could, to stay with family, and that meant a change in where their children went to school.
But for others, tension with the district is underpinning their decisions. While some say they’d like to return, their experience with district leadership in the aftermath of the crisis has left them unsure about coming back.
Kathryn Magrath disenrolled her son, a first-grader at Aveson, from PUSD and enrolled him in the Los Angeles Unified School District after the Jan. 30 Pasadena governing board meeting, where hundreds of families of displaced students urged the district to provide more safety assurances and adequate spaces for students.
“The lack of empathy of the board at the meeting and onslaught of concerned parents (not just for Aveson but for all the public schools) really had me reconsidering things,” Magrath said in an email statement.
Alexis Brooks’ son was in transitional kindergarten at Odyssey Charter-South. Brooks called the district’s response unempathetic and moved her son to Glendale Unified School District. Brooks and other Odyssey parents felt the solutions to relocate students were not adequate and put students’ health at risk.
“Just on every level PUSD, we have felt as a family, they’ve shown us that they don’t care about the safety of kids,” Brooks said.
Anthony Orlando, a Cal Poly Pomona professor of finance real estate and law, said the district’s predicament is a concern seen before in post-wildfire recoveries.
In 2017, after wildfires in Sonoma County, approximately 12% of displaced students, Orlando said, transferred to other schools. A study by Caltech researchers analyzing the impact of 2020 wildfires in Colorado found that two years after the fires test participation rates remained two to three percentage points lower than their peers.
“In the long run, the exodus is small compared to the total size of the school district,” Orlando said in an email. “Most students stay in the same county, but they’re dispersed over many possible schools.”
Since the Eaton fire, 352 students have disenrolled from PUSD and 206 have been enrolled, as of March 7, according to the district.
“Right now you have some changes going on of private school children coming back because their private school might not be inhabitable or burned down, and then we have some children that are moving away because their family doesn’t have a place to stay close by,” Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco said.
At the Feb. 27 meeting, Board Member Michelle Richardson Bailey defended the district and board members from the public accusing them of not caring.
“It’s hard to sit here in this position and be told over and over that you don’t care,” Richardson Bailey said. “I get that you feel that way, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m in this position because I care.”
The district’s fiscal woes have added another layer of concern.
The sunset of one-time COVID funds; years-long declining enrollment, which has shrunk state and federal funding; and constraints within the state education budget have been jolting the district’s fiscal position for months. As it emerges from the fires, it finds itself in a battle to stay solvent.
Last year, the district established a fiscal-stabilization plan that included laying off nearly 200 positions due to a projected $38 million deficit in the current fiscal year budget.
The district said it received a commitment from the state that it would be funded this school year and next school year based on pre-fire enrollment figures. Bravo-Karimi said the district will be advocating for the state to extend that to more years because of the impact of the fire.
“This is helpful but does not solve the financial challenges we were facing before the fire,” Bravo-Karimi said. “It does address the impact of loss of enrollment due to the fire but it doesn’t solve for preexisting fiscal challenges.
“The reductions that we’re moving forward with are only the reductions that we were moving forward with before the fire,” Bravo-Karimi added. “We’re only making the reductions that we would have made anyways had there not been a fire.”
Bravo-Karimi said the district is following advice from state and local agencies that said to proceed with pre- planned layoffs but to not make reductions at this time based on the impact of the fire.
Looking forward, Blanco said PUSD’s recently adopted 2023-2028 strategic plan will need to be reviewed in light of the fire’s impact.
She said learner-focused instruction, supporting employees and the district’s bond program are areas that will need to be looked at in the new reality.
“We’re going to have to revisit it. The pillars aren’t going to change, but what we do in the pillars is going to capture recovery efforts,” Blanco said. “That’s something that we didn’t really have written in the strategic plan as a focus because we didn’t know we were going to be in a disaster.”
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at USC, said her concern for PUSD students and those impacted by the fire is a general anxiety. The jolt of the fire itself, coupled with the displacement and subsequent uncertainty can lead to children having difficulty concentrating, sleeping, eating or making new relationships.
“When we abruptly change contexts, like moving to a new school with new people and new routines in the middle of the year, and especially if this move is unplanned and follows some kind of disaster or tragedy, the world around us changes drastically fcaand we have to spend mental energy and emotion trying to process what happened and where we are now and with whom,” Immordino-Yang said in an email.
She said parents and teachers need to understand how disruptive these changes can be to students and reestablish predictable and calm routines within their new context.
“Moving schools and communities suddenly is disorienting, and reorienting oneself becomes the consuming focus, rather than other kinds of learning and engagement,” Immordino-Yang said.