A classroom of Altadena Arts Magnet students used words like nervous, anxious, excited and happy Thursday, Aug. 20, to describe how they felt on their first day of third grade earlier this week.
For these third-graders it was not a typical first day of school. It was their first back at the campus they last stepped foot on as first-graders before the Eaton fire destroyed much of the Altadena community surrounding the school.
“We’re excited to be back,” Principal Dana Hill said. “We’re even more excited that we are the premier school in Altadena. We carry the name and we seem to be the only one that’s back. We’re excited about being back in the neighborhood.”
Altadena Arts Magnet was one of five schools forced to relocate after the January 2025 fire. The school did not suffer fire damage, but required smoke remediation extensive cleaning to be safe for children. Then there was the issue of the school being surrounded by burned down homes.
The other displaced campuses, which included Eliot Arts Magnet, Aveson School of Leaders, Odyssey Charter South and Rosebud Academy continue to be learn at temporary sites.
Hill invited any parents still trepidatious about their child returning to the campus to come see what the school looks like.
“Don’t count on what you hear or speculate, just come and see,” Hill said.
Yiota Regopoulos’ students sat on the floor listening to a story about the first day of school before being asked to come up with some words that could be used in their own story about their first day of third grade.
Hill and Pasadena Unified School District officials, including Blanco, visited the class Thursday morning. Hill asked for a show of hands about who had been at the school when the fire happened. Nearly every hand went up.
Students chimed in saying that the school looked a little different compared to when they left it back in 2025. It took some time to re-familiarize themselves with their campus, they said.
One student commented on how much bigger the Altadena Arts Magnet campus felt compared to their temporary home at Allendale, a PUSD school site in Pasadena used to house the displaced campus community.
While Altadena Arts Magnet students spent more than a full school year about four miles away from their Calaveras Street campus, parents spent much of that time fighting to make sure the return was not rushed and done safely. It wasn’t easy.
“We wanted them to really feel excited about returning,” Blanco said. “They had a couple requests of things and even though from a standpoint of safety it passed all the tests, but we wanted them to come home and feel like they were safe.”
Those requests started with parents pushing to stay at the Allendale site for longer than the district initially planned.
Altadena Arts Magnet parent Laura Siahaan put her professional skills as a data scientist to use to create a visualization that found within 250 yards of the school, 75 properties had at least one structure that burned in the fire.
When the district proposed bringing students back to Altadena Arts Magnet to start last school year, parents submitted a resolution that pushed students’ return back to January 2026, which was then extended back to the start of this school year.
In May 2025, parents requested interior testing of the campus for contaminants including lead, heavy metals and asbestos and the removal of porous items like wall-to-wall carpeting. This request turned out to be the toughest battle parents faced and one that was not resolved until more than one year later.
That initial request was denied by district leadership, setting off a series of meetings between Altadena Arts Magnet parents, PUSD officials and oversight agencies like Los Angeles County Public Health, Department of Toxic Substances Control and CalEPA.
“Everyone said, ‘wow you have a really compelling case,” but nobody would do anything about it,” Siahaan said.
In February of this year, CalEPA officially declined to make a recommendation to PUSD for additional testing.
The turning point, according to parent advocates, was a PUSD Board of Education facilities committee meeting the next month.
At that meeting, Assemblymember John Harabedian, D-Pasadena, presented AB 1642, legislation that would require schools, businesses and homes to test before occupancy. At the next Board of Education meeting, Blanco offered a resolution to contract for additional testing at Altadena Arts Magnet.
Siahaan and many parents juggled the ongoing fight with the district over their school’s future while dealing with the loss of their own homes in the fire. Parents said they had more success getting support from Board of Education trustees than they did from senior district leadership throughout the process.
“It was a lot of work, and arguably an unnecessary amount of work, that we had to go through to get this outcome,” Siahaan said. “Also, it took unnecessarily long. That’s the part I would say that leaves me the most frustrated.”
The final battle was over removing the school’s carpeting. The district assured parents it had been properly cleaned, but parents and teachers asked that it be removed. In June, the district announced it would be replacing all carpeting with hard wood floors.
Siahaan said the district’s slow response to parents’ demands led directly to many families choosing to remove their children from the school, either to another PUSD campus or out of the district. Parents were trying to make decisions about the upcoming school year in the spring before the announcement about carpeting being removed was announced.
According to the school district, Altadena Arts Magnet’s enrollment for the 2024-25 school year was 527. In 2025-26, enrollment was 442. Enrollment for the new school year is not yet available.
“Slowly, over time we kept losing more and more families because as it went on they said, ‘well if they haven’t done this yet what makes me think they’re going to now?’”
One of those parents was Stephanie Scribner, whose two children started at a new PUSD school. Scribner said she wanted to make a decision about the new school year and couldn’t wait for the district to act on some of her safety concerns.
“We really just made the decision in those last few weeks of the school year because my kids wanted to know,” Scribner said.
Even after the district ultimately took the clean-up steps Scribner was hoping for, she said it didn’t change how she felt about the decision to change schools.
“We’ve been at that school for five years,” Scribner said. “I felt very attached to that community and that place and it’s weird to think like I’m never going back to that campus, because we made a different decision, even though I know in my heart and head that we’ve made the right decision for our family.”