Four months of Zoom classes and a semester spent in an old Sears department store served as a band-aid during a school year filled with tragedy, but Palisades Charter High School is now ready to see students return.
Palisades Charter High School is the only school in the Palisades that serves high school students. The school suffered significant damage during the Palisades and Eaton Fires last year.
The destruction of the Palisades and Eaton fires last year displaced over 12,000 households, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.
After the Palisades fires in January 2025 blazed through 30% of Pali High’s campus, according to LAUSD, the school was forced to shut its doors for over a year. Students were welcomed back for the first time since the blaze, with parents and community members lining the entrance in blue and white, holding signs and smiles, last Tuesday.
The shutdown following the devastating wildfires resulted in four months of temporary online schooling before moving classes to a Sears site in Santa Monica. The switch to online schooling led to a decrease of about 400 students, especially as several displaced families moved away.
This 14% decrease in enrollment left the student body at 2,450 students, according to the L.A. Times.
While rebuilding efforts are still underway, the school has converted the baseball field into 36 modular classroom units that comply with the city’s new safety and permitting standards, according to SMDP.
This temporary fix cost $30 million, according to officials from the L.A. Unified School District. The buildings built on campus ‘green areas’ allowed the school to open its doors even as rebuilding is set to continue until 2029.
“It’s incredibly meaningful after this year of displacement, for them to be back to somewhere that represents something both familiar but also new opportunities,” Suzanne Hudson, the parent of a junior, told the LA Times.
With this $266.6 million restoration project underway, permanent campus reconstruction, including new classrooms and another baseball field, is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2029, according to the LA Times. The school’s main quad and classroom building survived the fire.
Because of its charter school status, Pali High leases its campus from LAUSD, which is covering the reconstruction costs. LA Fire Health test results indicate drinking water, soil, HVAC systems and indoor surfaces are safe from contamination.
“In the interiors of existing buildings, environmental contractors removed impacted materials,” said LAUSD’s report, published on Jan. 26. “Full environmental cleaning was completed in an abundance of caution in all classrooms … regardless of whether fire-related contamination was identified.”
For the Palisades community and the broader L.A. area, this strengthening of the Pali High Dolphins community means more than a rebuilding of infrastructure.
“This week we celebrate not only the reopening of our campus but the spirit that carried us through,” Principal Pamela Magee wrote in the school’s weekly newsletter.
The students and staff at Palisades Charter High School, along with other schools in the area, such as Marquez Charter Elementary and Odyssey Charter School-South, can now return to some sense of normalcy. However, students and staff at many other schools in the area are less fortunate.
Both the Aveson Global Leadership Academy and the Aveson School of Leaders have yet to resume operations at their former campuses. After the fires, students from the AGLA were quickly assigned to classrooms at Wilson Middle School in Pasadena.
However, the ASL students were required to wait longer before securing housing. Many schools were unwilling or unable to cooperate until ASL students were eventually split between Cleveland Elementary and Washington Elementary.