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UPDATED: 5 p.m., Jan. 12, 2025
As Adrian Tamayo drove to his teaching job at Lorena Street Elementary in Boyle Heights on Wednesday morning, he was struck by the “heavy cloud of smoke over Los Angeles.”
“Why are we going to work?” he wondered as a set of wildfires ravaged the Los Angeles region, leaving dismal air quality.
On school grounds, he saw palm tree debris and other trash left behind from a severe windstorm the previous day. He flicked ashes off his face that kept falling from the sky. The inside of his classroom smelled like smoke.
Tamayo estimated a student attendance of 50% — and by approximately 10:30 a.m. — the school’s PA system announced his campus would be closed, urging staff to inform families to pick up their children.
Dozens of parents lined up outside the school as staff verified emergency contact information and released one or two children at a time, said Tamayo, a special education teacher. All hands were on deck. A little over a handful of students remained on campus just before noon. Educators were dismissed soon after that, he said.
All Los Angeles Unified schools have been closed since Thursday. On Wednesday, officials announced more than 200 schools would shut down after classes were already in session, even though they were not in direct fire danger. About 100 other schools were placed on minimum-day schedules.
Shortly after 4 p.m. Sunday, LAUSD announced that most schools and all district offices would reopen on Monday, Jan. 13.
READ MORE: See a list of schools that will remain closed.
Meanwhile, questions remain about the district’s scrambled response during a crisis and concerns about similar situations in the future.
Educators are urging for their schools to be cleaned before opening, and are highlighting the need for a clear evacuation plan for all district schools to follow in future emergencies. Some still question why schools were open at all on Wednesday – a day after fires broke out – amid power outages and air filled with smoke and ash.
“Are our air conditioning filters going to be ready because we know that the ash is going to be obviously embedded in those HVAC unit filters,” Tamayo, who is the chair of the United Teachers Los Angeles East Area, told Boyle Heights Beat on Thursday.
On Saturday the district shared photos on Instagram showing maintenance crews and custodial staff cleaning school sites. In one caption, the district said HVAC specialists were inspecting air filters at every campus and “replacing filters as needed.”
Tamayo also wondered how the school evacuation could have gone smoother. He heard stories of other students remaining on campus until about 1 or 2 p.m. “Some schools never even went through an evacuation procedure,” he said.
“When I saw the dismissal at my school, I’m thinking, ‘How can this be better?’ If this is a true emergency and people need to get out of this building, how are we going to do this better? It just took too long to evacuate a little over 200 kids,” Tamayo said.
While the district has not answered Boyle Heights Beat’s questions about the evacuation process, LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho at a Thursday evening press conference said they decided to close schools again on Friday after reviewing air quality data.
“Fires may be far away from some communities where we have schools, however, winds are transporting particulate matter, smoke, and ashes across the entire district,” Carvalho said.
“Reopening the school system is not an easy process, particularly after a crisis like this one. We need to do indoor and outdoor cleaning, the replacement of filters,” he added.
Before Carvalho announced the decision to close all LAUSD schools, unions representing more than 74,000 district workers condemned the superintendent for not closing all schools sooner in a letter declaring it unacceptable “that the nation’s second-largest school district has demonstrated a delayed and inadequate response to this crisis.”
The United Teachers Los Angeles on Wednesday also issued a statement criticizing the district for its “delayed response” that “forced students to attend school only to implement closures after they had already arrived at their campuses.”
“Today serves as a stark wake-up call for a new normal.”
UTLA
On Friday morning, parents and their children stopped by Hollenbeck Middle School to pick up free meals offered by LAUSD. They walked out with bags filled with fruit, carrots, waffles and milk.
Karina Guerrero said the meals were helpful, but she couldn’t help but tear up as she recalled dropping off her 4-year-old daughter Wednesday morning to transitional kindergarten at Morris K. Hamasaki Elementary in East L.A. Guerrero wound up driving back to the school to pick her up even before receiving the notice of the school closure through a text message.
“I kept thinking … ‘Why did I take her?’ So I just went back,” she said.
“That was my first time bringing her to school this year, so I was already emotional because of that. … It reminds me of the pandemic. She’s a pandemic baby,” Guerrero said. “This is her first year in school, and it just makes me emotional.”
Guerrero said the district should have closed the schools sooner. “Look at the pollution,” she said Friday morning. Guerrero was unsure if she would take her daughter to school on Monday.
Pedro Lopez said it was a fairly smooth process to pick up his children from Bravo Medical Magnet High School and from a KIPP charter school on Wednesday, since not all parents arrived at the same time. He recalls getting to Bravo at about 11 a.m.
Lopez noted that N.E.W. Academy Canoga Park, where he works as a plant manager, made the call to close a lot sooner than Bravo or the KIPP charter school. Lopez said he got an email from the N.E.W. Academy school principal about its closure at about 6 a.m.
It was upsetting that his children’s schools were still open Wednesday morning, he said.
“The air still travels through the AC vent. … They’re still going to be smelling that smoke,” Lopez said.
John Vergara, an LAUSD administrator who hosts a podcast for educators, said in a video posted on Instagram that they were not prepared to evacuate an entire school despite being accustomed to earthquake and fire drills.
However, he said, “We sprung into action.” Everybody helped out, he said, from the sped assistant to the parent representative.
“One of the more difficult things was to make sure that our students who ride the school buses safely boarded the buses and that there [were] families there to pick up their own children,” he said in another video. “Our team did a great job. We had everybody pull together [to] call families … That took some time.”
A teacher at the Roosevelt High campus said it was chaotic trying to figure out how to quickly check ID’s and go through the emergency contact list as crowds of parents showed up at the same time on Wednesday to pick up their children, she said. Her throat felt scratchy after being outside helping to dismiss students.
“It’s just very challenging because I think people are doing their best,” said the teacher who wanted to be interviewed anonymously.
Just like an active shooter plan is now a priority, an emergency evacuation plan is now necessary “as climate change becomes more and more real,” she said.
“For earthquake rules, we evacuate out to the field. Well, if there was a major earthquake, and we’re all in the field, now what are we going to do?” she said.
Regardless, she said, “One of the really great things about our schools is that people really care.”
“All the adults show up … and they try to problem-solve together, even if nobody is here to have that system ready for us,” she said.
Good article. You raised points that I hadn’t thought of. Thanks for covering this story, Not in Boyle Heights nor Latino, but enjoyed the read to make sure our community does better. thanks
These union folks will find any excuse on earth not have to go to work, even when a wildfire is burning 35 miles away from their campus with zero air quality issues.
Im in Canoga Park and my neighbors kids who attend NEW Academy were shocked to hear that LAUSD were still open! All the private or Charter schools in our area closed, EXCEPT those LAUSD schools! As soon as my kids got picked up by the school bus, a short while later we can smell the smoke from the Pacific Palisides. Then the fire from Sylmar was also blowing towards us. By 9am we can see ashes in the sky. So it’s crazy living in the valley knowing we are highly likely of having a fire that they wouldn’t close! My parents live in Boyle Heights and they were upset, my mom crying to see kids were going to school in her neighborhood when her car was covered in ashes!
Great job of covering exactly what it felt like for me teaching in South L.A. You really captured my exact feelings and I have not seen this type of story anywhere else.
maybe follow the guidelines that the state mandated?? Get training in school emergency plans and planning?
https://www.caloes.ca.gov/office-of-the-director/operations/planning-preparedness-prevention/planning-preparedness/school-emergency-planning-safety/
I serve in the Air Force Reserves and I am a techer with the LAUSD.
I was very disappointed on the lack of preparation for evacuation to radio discipline.
I witnessed the upper personal run around confused and the retrieval of kids was poorly mitigated.
The emergency management or risk manager need to be fired.
The school personal must be trained in Incident Command Systems.
If the fires were any closer, we would all be dead.