Fires burn Los Angeles schools and destroy outdoor education sanctuaries

For Irina Contreras, a program manager for Los Angeles County’s Department of Arts and Culture, outdoor education was a refuge for both her and her daughter during the pandemic.

Now, much of that refuge has been burned in the raging wildfires around Los Angeles.

Her 7-year-old daughter, Ceiba, hikes with a kid’s adventure group called Hawks and attended Matilija, a bilingual forest school for preschool and kindergarten. Rain or shine, she and her friends would spend their days climbing, jumping, hiking, and swimming in places like Eaton Canyon Nature Area, a 190-acre (77-hectare) preserve near Altadena, now destroyed by fire.

Ceiba learned to ask plants for permission before taking samples to glue into her nature journal. Once, her group discovered a hidden path that led behind a waterfall. Ceiba couldn’t stop talking about it for days.

For parents like Contreras, the wildfires have been devastating not just because of the loss of life and thousands of homes. They are mourning natural and educational areas that served as sanctuaries and learning spaces for local families, especially in the years since the pandemic. The fires have torn through natural areas that served every type of educational setting: public and private schools, nature-based preschools, homeschool groups, summer camps and more.

They have burned school buildings, too, including Odyssey Charter School in Altadena, which Miguel Ordeñana’s children attend.

“The community has been devastated by the fire,” said Ordeñana, senior manager of community science at the Natural History Museum. “It’s been a challenge to carefully share that news with my children and help them work through their emotions. A lot of their friends lost their homes. And we don’t know the impact to school staff, like their teachers, but a lot of them live in that area as well and have lost their homes.”

Some areas untouched by fire were inaccessible because of poor air quality. Griffith Park, home of the Hollywood sign, had not been affected by the end of the week but it’s not clear when the air quality there will be good enough to resume outdoor programs, said Ordeñana, who was the first to capture on camera a late puma in the nearby area that gained fame under the name P-22.

Ordeñana said his family was able to connect with some other families from Odyssey Charter School for pizza and an indoor playdate, but he is uncertain what the days will look like for them with school closures already extending through next week.

All schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, were closed Friday because of heavy smoke and ash over the city. Classes will not resume until conditions improve, officials said. Pasadena Unified School District also closed schools and several of its campuses sustained damage, including Eliot Arts Magnet Middle School.

The California Department of Education released a statement Wednesday saying 335 schools from Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and San Diego counties were closed. It was unclear how many would be closed Monday.

During the pandemic, Contreras felt like she was stuck on a screen. She devoted much of her energy to working, writing and organizing, but her daughter’s outdoor education helped her better understand the value of stepping away from the grind.

Contreras feels confident the outdoor programs will return, although it’s unclear when it will be safe for people to hike around areas like Eaton Canyon.

“The nature center is gone,” Richard Smart, superintendent of the Eaton Canyon Natural Area in Pasadena, said Thursday. “The wildflowers, the shrubs are gone.” The park hosted dozens of school field trips a year and Smart estimates more than a thousand students visited yearly.

“Teachers liked it because it was also free, it was local, it was nearby. And it was a place to see nature — wild nature but also in a friendly, safe environment,” he said.

Only a few exterior walls of the Eaton Canyon Nature Center were left standing, he said.

“For many of the local school districts, we truly were in their backyard, and now they won’t be able to use it for the foreseeable future,” he said. “The park is such a touchstone for people in the community, and so to lose that is just, devastating is not even the right word. It feels indescribable.”

Many parents and teachers are likely wondering what to do and where to take their children as fires continue to burn across Los Angeles, said Lila Higgins, a senior manager for community science at the Natural History Museum and author of “Wild L.A,” a field trip and nature guidebook.

A certified forest therapy guide, Higgins says time in nature lowers heart rates, lowers blood pressure and helps children with attention deficit disorder feel more calm and relaxed.

“For children’s cognitive development, time in nature and time spent connecting with nature is so important,” she said. Outdoor spaces also can help children learn how to develop relationships through connections with animals, understand orientation through space by following trails and map-reading and understand human impact on wildlife.

“A lot of the places that we’re talking about are really popular with homeschoolers, but they also are a destination for some field trips, certainly places like Eaton Canyon,” said Greg Pauly, co-author of “Wild L.A.” and director of the Urban Nature Research Center at the museum. “I do think it’s safe to say that people are going to continue to be interacting with those landscapes and it will hopefully still be a field trip destination in the future. But it’s certainly going to be a while before that happens.”

“This is the reality of modern Southern California,” he said. “Fire changes the landscape and people’s lives shockingly often.”

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Mumphrey reported from Phoenix and Lurye reported from New Orleans.

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