The community of the Pacific Palisades was devastated by the Californian wildfires that began in early January 2025. Over 6,800 homes, commercial buildings and other structures were lost, with families dislocated and a generation of students once again losing time on campus, forced to make do at an empty Sears department store in Santa Monica without books or proper Wi-Fi. Now, a little over a year later, the students of Palisades Charter High School have finally resumed classes on campus.
The Palisades Village was a charming neighborhood against the coast, reminiscent of colonial towns with a seaside Edwardian architecture. Many of the homes, structures and businesses had been unchanged for decades. The Palisades only recently saw the addition of a beautiful shopping center constructed by Rick Caruso with a renovated 1950s-esque movie theater, luxury dining, shops, a grassy lawn for picnics and pets, coffee shops like Alfred’s Coffee and an Erewhon Market.
Today, almost none of the older, charming, long standing structures remain. Entire neighborhood grids are still leveled to the ground, while the presence of construction companies have yet to see any physical rebuilding processes. The ocean is devastatingly visible from Sunset Boulevard, and although the entirety of Caruso Village survived the fire due to a private fire brigade loaded with many barrels of fire retardant, the structure is still completely vacated and closed to the public. On their official website, Caruso states, “Palisades Village will reopen in 2026 as the vibrant, welcoming destination you remember — a reflection of our community’s strength, resilience and shared vision for the future,” but we are now four months into 2026 and there are no visible signs of reopening.
Despite all this loss, a few businesses have survived the fires and are up and running today. The Starbucks in the Highlands and the Chipotle off Sunset Boulevard quickly returned to serve the needs of the community. The Palisades Garden Cafe has been an enduring beacon of the Palisades family as a widely popular spot amongst youth and adults alike, whose structural integrity survived last winter and has been open ever since the disaster to give support and resilience to the neighborhood.
But it’s not just the community’s physical persistence; the real strength of the Pacific Palisades lies in their strong social bonds, forged through decades of living, loving and learning amongst each other. The destruction of this community was calamitous and catastrophic, but armed with familial and social congruity, reconstruction seems less bleak. Homes will be rebuilt, families will return to their neighborhoods, material goods will be repurchased, new sentimental items will be made, memories will be forged, shopping centers will return and business will once again flourish. The human capability to create and recreate will one day patch up all this loss and obscure this desolate moment. There is only one thing that humankind will never be able to create, recreate or subjugate — time.
Time is the cheapest commodity and yet it cannot be purchased or sold. The bonds of the Palisades community are only as strong as the time that Palisades residents have spent learning to love and live with one another in equal passion for their shared home. The greatest loss of this wounding event is not the homes, buildings, material goods or even nature — which will always regrow despite human damage — the greatest loss is the loss of time in the community. And specifically my concern is the time at Palisades Charter High School, an entire year that students of all grades will never be able to get back. Those of us who lost a year and a half due to the COVID-19 pandemic feel this loss most vividly. I lost my own sophomore year at Pali High due to the pandemic — a year I ponder on from time to time, a year of opportunities never explored and friendships never made, all the lessons I will never learn.
It was most assuredly the morose experience of online schooling that pushed the Palisades administration to resume school somewhere in person as fast as possible — and that somewhere was an old Sears department store in Santa Monica.
The Palisades administration to the best of their ability reacted to this situation with understanding, effectiveness and adaptability. However, the experience at Sears was far from ideal. Former students of Palisades High School that completed their senior year at the department store revealed many glaring obstacles to their educational experience: a lack of Wi-Fi, no doors for the makeshift classrooms, a complete overpopulation and crowding of the building’s capacity, students left waiting for parking and the area’s significant homeless population repeatedly harassing students and even trespassing into the building, causing safety concerns. All the physical textbooks and even electronics essential to learning had been lost with many campus structures.
The school experienced an entire year of attempting to preserve physical education lagged by the ability to conduct it with a third of its materials, which is but a testament to the passion and aptness of the teachers and faculty, as well as to the proficiency and understanding of their students who, despite these challenges, largely worked with their educators and not against them.
Palisades High has recently returned to their classrooms and their doors — but the plight is not over. Many teachers lost everything in their classrooms, not only due to the initial fires, but also the clean up process afterwards, as classrooms were cleared in their entirety and Wi-Fi remains unstable in the area.
“Walking into my classroom two months ago and seeing that there was nothing there that I collected in the past 30 years was kind of shocking.”
To get a true and firsthand sense of how the experience of students and teachers has been impacted by these factors, I reached out to my former AP English Language teacher from Palisades High School, Steve Klima, a well-known and well-loved teacher, to ask him a few questions.
With his delightful, old, stoic humor he initially told me, “It’s good to be back instead of Sears. Some things I liked about Sears was proximity, it was closer to my home … I could actually take the bus to work … but it’s nice to be back on the Palisades Campus.”
Then, with more formality, I asked how this displacement has affected student attendance, to which Klima said, “With COVID, you know, you started getting this idea once we came back on campus not to come to school if you felt sick in any way, shape or form. The fire, I don’t think it had that much of an impact, but it was definitely different going to Sears. A big impact was on our ninth grade class, students that did not have any connection to Pali High. I think we lost quite a few students because of that. And a lot of older students who experienced COVID did not want to go back online, so they ended up transferring schools.”
I prodded further, asking about the impact on student learning and engagement throughout his personal experience in the past year. He spoke about having to adapt his AP lesson plans due to the period of online learning, and the loss of textbooks and paper materials with a surprisingly positive twist.
“I couldn’t do any practice multiple choices or anything like that, I just focused on essays and so my students just wrote a bunch of essays and my scores last year for my AP were higher than usual and more fives then usual.”
On the experience at Sears, Klima said, “personally there were some things I couldn’t really do as far as you know, maybe showing a film, I didn’t want to interrupt any classes. Whereas here at Pali you could always close your door and have privacy … I think the learning loss was mainly due to being online. I think the reason so many students ended up leaving was being worried about going online again because they had such a bad experience when they were in — I think a lot of them were in middle school.”
I wanted to know how the teachers themselves have been impacted by these changes. Klima explained that “there were teachers who lost their classrooms and immediately knew that all the things they had were gone … so they actually went through the mourning process last January … For teachers like myself, my classroom was still there so we kind of went through [mourning] within the last couple months. I heard from different teachers that all these different things were still in some teachers’ classrooms, but in my classroom things were just empty. What was kind of weird was going through the mourning process at different stages for different teachers.”
What I found most admirable about my former teacher’s countenance was his utter lack of any bitterness towards the reality that his ability to teach has been continuously disrupted by the hardships and obstacles over the past decade, including COVID-19. Although the tumultuous climate of today’s world in political, socio-economic and environmental senses sometimes appears to only affect a world far away from the United States that we live in, it is catastrophes that occur on smaller scales near us that bring our attention to the broader issues of today. In the case of the Palisades Fires, it is not only money and infrastructure that have taken a hit. The right to an education and the formative social experience of schooling has been the hidden victim of the many exterior forces that led to this specific disaster, just as it had been victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. A social education should not be seen as a luxury, but as a fundamental human right, and it is up to society to comprehend the gravity of its importance so as not to allow its sacrifice to the greater forces at play that are shaping this modern world.
The community of the Palisades is long-standing, well-known and economically armed, factors which will contribute to a quicker rebuilding process while offering aid to its residents. To less luxurious and economically gilded neighborhoods however, destruction on this scale can be devastating in its finality, and it is up to us as Californians to pay attention to the needs of our communities and bring attention to issues afforded less coverage. More than a year after the Palisades Fires, Palisades natives and Angelenos are anxiously awaiting the city’s full return.
