When Jackson Brooks and Dayton Johansen, both juniors at Marshall Fundamental Secondary School in Pasadena, California, got to school on Tuesday, January 7, the Santa Ana winds were starting to pick up in intensity. Some of their peers were already growing concerned.
Later that day, the Eaton fire erupted in the Altadena-Pasadena area, forcing many students and teachers to evacuate. First, school was canceled until the end of the week; but as the severity of the situation escalated, all schools within Pasadena Unified School District were closed through Wednesday, January 22.
Brooks and Johansen were also forced to evacuate. Brooks’s house was okay, but he counts upward of 20 people in his community who have since lost their homes to the fire, including Johansen, who is now staying with his grandmother in Burbank.
Johansen tells Teen Vogue, “I lost pretty much all of my belongings, so it’ll be difficult to attend school — not to mention we’ll be two, three weeks behind in terms of class. It really just depends how things develop here," he adds, "but I will do my best to continue my academic career.”
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Cal Fire reported that the ongoing Palisades and Eaton fires in the Los Angeles area have damaged, if not entirely destroyed, more than 18,000 structures. This includes, according to USA Today, more than a dozen K-12 schools in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood; Marquez Charter Elementary School; the Westside Waldorf School’s McComb Campus and Palisades Charter Elementary School were almost entirely burned down; and the fire damaged about 40% of Palisades Charter High School’s facilities, rendering it inoperable,
In the Altadena-Pasadena area where the Eaton fire took hold, Odyssey Charter School-South, Franklin Elementary School (which closed in 2020), Pasadena Rosebud Academy, Eliot Arts Magnet Academy, the Village Playgarden, Pasadena Waldorf School, and the Rayuela School sustained significant damage. In addition, Aveson School of Leaders and Saint Mark’s School were completely leveled.
The ongoing wildfires also forced school closures across the Los Angeles region due to unsafe air-quality levels, including heightened levels of dangerous toxins such as lead and asbestos from older buildings that have burned down, plus widespread power outages. Similarly, some LA-area colleges temporarily canceled classes.
The damage caused by the Palisades and Eaton fires is just starting to be quantified as firefighters steadily work toward containment. Out of the rubble, a shell-shocked metropolis is resolutely springing into action to aid thousands of displaced people. But beyond the immediate needs of food, water, and shelter, what happens when a school is destroyed? What happens when students are now effectively homeless, scattered throughout Southern California and elsewhere? What happens when children are not only torn away from their educational network but watch their entire community turn to ashes?
In recent years, education systems across the country have grappled with the devastation of natural disasters. Last fall, schools across western North Carolina shuttered for weeks amid the destruction of Hurricane Helene. In 2018, many schools were severely damaged or destroyed as a result of the Camp fire in Paradise, CA. In 2021, the Marshall fire rendered dozens of local students homeless in Boulder County, Colorado. In 2013, flooding in Jamestown, CO, also displaced students, while their school campus was turned into a disaster-relief center, according to Chalkbeat. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated 110 of the 126 public school buildings in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Now we are seeing a similar story unfold in the Los Angeles area. Schools still standing have temporarily been turned into relief centers, displaced students are considering resuming classes remotely or have been moved to different schools or districts, and impacted students are trying to help one another.
“Me and my brother were very hasty to try to get back into Pasadena so we could start making more of a difference and start working and rebuilding our community,” Brooks says. Brooks and his brother have since launched Eaton Fire Relief 2025, a youth-led coalition throughout the Altadena-Pasadena region working to clear the houses of affected community members, while distributing bottled water, clothing, and food.
Robert Bringas Jr., principal of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary School, a private Catholic school in Pasadena, says the school canceled class during the first week the fires broke out after officials saw how many of their students and staff were forced to evacuate. About 60% of the school’s families lived in an evacuation zone, according to Bringas. Since then, the school’s auditorium has been transformed into a temporary relief center, filled to the brim with boxes of donated clothes and supplies. World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit food-relief organization founded by chef José Andrés, has also set up a distribution site on the school’s campus, which is at the edge of an evacuation zone.
Bringas says he has already received calls from families who had been attending schools in surrounding areas that were significantly damaged, adding that he is hoping to accommodate all interested students into his school’s classrooms. Classes resumed on January 13. The school itself has about 10 families who have lost their homes, and is currently surveying impacted families on how they can best provide support. “We have a family that is displaced but they have family in Downey,” Bringas says. “We were just talking about that to figure out how to get [the student] here to school, because she wants to come back to school.”
According to Betty Lai, an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at Boston College, disasters can induce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. In the case of wildfires, some students may have physical injuries or asthma-related symptoms. Disaster can also disrupt a student’s ability to concentrate in school, she says.
It is important, Lai continues, that schools reopen as quickly as possible after a disaster, because schools provide an important routine for students. “The thing about disasters is they create a lot of unpredictability,” she notes. “One of the number one recommendations we have for schools and for young people and their families after a disaster event is to get them back into routine, because [routines] are comforting and can help create a sense of normalcy.”
However, with so many schools damaged or destroyed in the LA fires and so many students displaced, any return to normal will be an uphill battle. On January 14, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order permitting students to attend schools outside of their normal districts; allowing damaged or destroyed schools to hold classes in temporary spaces; and removing class-size requirements for kindergarten through eighth grade.
According to Alice Fothergill, a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont who specializes in disaster sociology, when you have a large-scale disaster that impacts an entire community, there needs to be an enormous amount of institutional support. “Everybody in the receiving communities — even the upper-level administrators, teachers, the custodians — everyone who interacts with those children should have some training so they know exactly how to support them and understand signs of distress,” Fothergill tells Teen Vogue.
For Fothergill, this means being vigilant about checking in on children who miss school and understanding what barriers there might be for displaced students, whether that be lost vaccination records or a missing uniform. The kind of support each child needs might look different, she says: “There’s variation. Some children really need to do art therapy or talk with someone about what happened. Some might not want to talk about it. So that’s really where that training comes in.”
Fothergill, who has been studying the impacts of disasters for almost 30 years, says that “it is becoming less unique for children to experience multiple disasters during their childhoods,” and that the compounding impacts of multiple educational disruptions — from natural disasters to the pandemic — increase the vulnerability of children and challenge their educational continuity. “[Children living through multiple disasters] used to not be something we saw very much,” Fothergill adds. “Now what we’re seeing is, oh, no, in fact, kids from Hurricane Katrina also went through the BP oil spill, or kids who were in one tropical storm were then in a later hurricane.”
Says Anastasia Vanderpool, a junior at UCLA, “I think that a lot of people are starting to feel that there's no normalcy to be expected from their college experience.” Vanderpool and one of her roommates evacuated from the Palisades fire. “A lot of people have kind of been half jokingly, like, ‘When are we going to have a normal quarter?’”
According to Shannon Gibson, professor of environmental studies, international relations, and political science at the University of Southern California, as climate change accelerates, we will not only see an increased frequency of natural disasters, but also an increased intensity. “In Southern California, we’ve had almost no rainfall since July 2024, and this is typically our rainy season,” Gibson explains. “Now we have this incredibly dry forest and grasslands and brush, and that just creates conditions that are right for the fires to occur and then spread in the way that they have…. We no longer have a predictable fire season; now we just have this perpetual, year-round threat of fire.”
As schools resume classes, displaced families are still figuring out their next moves, and immediate disaster-relief efforts remain in full swing throughout the Los Angeles area. For Pasadena resident Lauren Sandidge, whose two kids’ schools were both leveled in the Eaton fire, figuring out these next steps means staying close to those who have been impacted — teachers and families. “Everyone’s been really trying to just communicate,” Sandidge says. “The message that I’m trying to send my kids is that, even if the building is gone, that’s not what makes the school and the community. It’s the people.”
