LAKE COUNTY >> With the majority of Lake County K—12 students returning to school this week, a concerted effort is being made by education faculty and staff to welcome kids back after the traumatic Mendocino Complex Fire emergency. For some school districts, including Lakeport Unified, the experience of delays and near-universal fire evacuations was a new and challenging one.
According to Clear Lake High School Assistant Principal Jennifer Scheel, “it required flexibility from all of us.” Principal Jill Falconer went on to say that “other people have been so understanding,” noting that Middletown High School had offered the use of its gym for CLHS to start volleyball season if their own gym was still too ash-laden. Later, Upper Lake High School students came to the Lakeport gym to practice, as the Upper Lake evacuation orders had not been lifted until well after those for Lakeport. “It’s been the whole entire community” coming together, Falconer said.
The Lakeport Unified, Upper Lake Unified, and Lucerne Elementary School Districts began classes on Wednesday, August 22. Middletown and Konocti Unified School Districts began Monday, August 20, and preschools in the county have been in step with their respective districts. Kelseyville Unified’s normal start date remains set for September 4.
Wildfire has impacted the communities of Lake County many times over the past few years, most notably during the Valley Fire of 2015, which devastated the southwestern part of the county. But evacuations on the scale of those required for the Mendocino Complex are a first in recent memory. Addressing the difficulties resulting from the fires this year, Scheel said of her district that “we haven’t had to deal with it in this capacity. With the Valley Fire we had the possibility of being a shelter, but that didn’t happen, and we opened school as scheduled.”
Unfortunately, the toll that fire has taken this year in Lake County has been hard to brush off. At Clear Lake High School, one student’s father lost his Upper Lake home on Elk Mountain Road to the Ranch Fire. In the Upper Lake Unified School District, multiple students’ homes were damaged or destroyed. “We’ve already reached out to the kids we know were affected in any way” by the fires, Falconer said, to communicate that “we’re here for you if you need us.”
Nevertheless, a variety of work has gone into the post-fire process, from vast cleanup efforts spearheaded by Doug Bridges’ Servpro of Lakeport—which has employed dozens of faculty, staff, and even some students in cleanup assistance at local schools in recent weeks—to trauma-informed training for education professionals.
According to Upper Lake High School Principal Sandy Coatney, “cleaning was dramatic.” Because of evacuation orders, regular maintenance staff were largely unable to come in for summer cleaning. Despite this, said Coatney, a few heroic individuals “were trying to come back and work,” but were deterred by law enforcement at road blocks. Given the dire situation, Servpro teams stepped in to assist with the cleanup effort.
Zane Jensen, a friend of local Servpro owner Bridges and a teacher of 8th grade history at Terrace Middle School in Lakeport, said that “when we were working we probably had 30 or 40 people here going at it” to clean up the school. They HEPA-vac cleaned each room and ensured that every horizontal surface up to seven feet high was free of ash.
In addition, school districts affected by the fires have installed a relatively new system to monitor air quality in real-time on their campuses. Called PurpleAir, the system consists of an air monitor unit installed on-site which is keyed into an “internet of things” network, allowing district employees to know the particulate breakdown of the air in their schools at any given moment. Depending on levels of hazardous material, administrators will adjust certain outdoor activities or even close down schools should the hazard level reach a high point during the day.
Now that buildings have been cleaned and air quality has stabilized, kids have been able to return to school. For teachers and staff, the next question concerns how to handle the trauma of the fires within the school environment. Principal Coatney said that he and other administrators had discussed whether to start school sooner rather than later as a part of this effort. “We came to the conclusion that even if people don’t feel like they are ready yet, having the kids come back and get back in that routine would be huge.” Coatney explained that children are safe at school, and are often bolstered by the presence of their peers.
For students, it can be healing to go back to school. Coatney noted that he and other administrators visited emergency shelters in Lake County after a recent board meeting and talked with students. He said that students asked whether their school was alright, and when school started. Coatney didn’t hear a single student hoping for delays to continue.
Because of delays, affected school districts are attempting to release their schools from the responsibility of having to complete the standard total number of school days in the 2018-2019 school year. Should the standard required number of days be maintained, said Coatney, there would be “financial consequences” for schools, who would have to pay their faculty and staff more, as well as likely resistance from students and parents. Assistant Principal Scheel at CLHS said that there are a few steps to the process for getting the standard required days waived. “We apply for a waiver to the State Department of Education,” she said, and “we won’t know until December” whether the application has been approved.