For the foreseeable future, a school that burned during the fires in Los Angeles this year will call a retrofitted Sears home.
Students and teachers at Palisades Charter High School have met online since a wildfire swept through Pacific Palisades in January and decimated their school building and many of their homes. On Tuesday, they gathered in person at their school’s temporary new home in nearby Santa Monica, where they hugged, cried and navigated classrooms set up inside the former department store.
“After everything we’ve been through — now we have a place to be all of a sudden,” Charlie Speiser, a junior, said. He had commuted over an hour from Hermosa Beach, where his family is living after having lost their home in the fire.
The new facility, located on the busy southern edge of Downtown Santa Monica, is called “Pali South.” It will serve students for the remainder of the school year, and potentially well into the next, depending on the speed of recovery at their Palisades campus. About 40 percent of the campus was destroyed in the fire.
The building is a local landmark — a 1947 design by the architect Rowland Crawford, with grooved ivory and green walls. A large blue Pali High sign now replaces what was a neon green Sears sign above the entrance. Inside, 90 classrooms, a few offices and some communal areas have been constructed using a $10 million insurance payment, as well as donations and school funds.
Teachers tried to find ways to make the new building feel more like their old school.
Robert King, who teaches U.S. history, lost many of the educational props that filled his former classroom, including flags, posters and busts of presidents, after the items were exposed to smoke and chemicals. Students and some alumni gave replacement posters. One student wrote “F104,” the number of Mr. King’s classroom at Pali, on a concrete wall in chalk.
By late morning, some students seemed to be settling in, and approved of the new setup.
“They nailed it,” said Ocean Silkman, a junior.
Still, moving into an enclosed space from what was essentially an outdoor school was an adjustment, several students said. At the Pali High campus, most hallways were outdoors.
“We took the sunlight for granted,” Zoya Kassam, a senior, said. As students made their way through the new building, bottlenecks formed and Tiffany Jensen, a junior, said she felt “dazed and confused.” Staff members made adjustments in real time, rerouting the flow.
The structure has sat empty since the Sears store closed in 2017, and an attempt to repurpose it as an office was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was completely unclaimed,” said Kelly Farrell, a managing director at the architecture firm Gensler. “We just had to give it purpose and place.”
That purpose came just weeks after the wildfire, when Pali High administrators called Ms. Farrell and asked if she could help turn the 100,000-square-foot space into a functioning high school.
“Yes,” she recalled telling them. “We don’t know what help means, but we’re going to help you figure it out.” She was at the site that Sunday morning.
By mid-March, the design team had put together some sketches. A few days later, the school negotiated a lease of $200,000 from the real estate firms that had been trying to rent it as offices.
“No one ever stopped from that point on,” said Pam Magee, Pali High’s principal.
Working from dawn to dusk, the crew finished construction in a month. Gensler laid out acoustical panels for walls, and quilted insulation above, to soften the din of high schoolers. It also designed colorful graphics for many surfaces. Tables, desks, chairs, couches and thousands of square feet of carpet were donated. Things that weren’t free came at a discount, or were expedited.
The City of Santa Monica helped expedite approvals and encouraged collaboration between its agencies to help the school construction.
Since Sears, like most department stores, had few windows, many classrooms are windowless, and there were other sacrifices made for the sake of speed, budget and space. There are no doors on the classrooms, for instance, and no whiteboards on the walls. Students have to use temporary bathroom facilities in the parking lot. And premade lunches are served from what used to be an old Sears delivery window.
The school will use other schools’ athletic and theater facilities and public parks.
But for students, many of whom remember learning remotely during the pandemic, the thrill of being together seemed to outweigh the hardships.
“So many people are so happy to get back to in person,” Tiffany Jensen said.
Many Pali High students may not go to school at the new facility. Some have opted to continue partial online learning, and about 500 have moved to other schools.
How long the school will remain in Santa Monica is unclear.
Nick Melvoin, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns Pali’s Palisades campus, said that treatment of smoke and other damage at the school’s surviving buildings, and the placement of portable classrooms on the baseball field, should be completed by July or August.
But the surrounding neighborhood is still decimated, and nearby Temescal Canyon Road is filled with both fire-related debris and trucks hauling it away.
Many families and educators in the school have voiced concerns about students’ physical and mental well-being if they return too soon.
Ms. Magee, the principal, said that even if the new building were temporary, she hoped it would provide hope.
“It’s not just about reopening a school,” she said. “It’s about restoring a community.”