By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief
After months of remediation work, Calvary Christian School and Calvary Palisades have resumed classes and church services at their Highlands campus.
“In June we made the decision after school was out to come back to campus in the fall,” Head of School Vince Downey told the Palisadian-Post.
He described discussing the testing, retesting and remediation process, saying “if it’s safe and we complete the work, then we needed to come back,” a decision he said was two-fold.
“One was to provide the education in the school,” he said. “But also, we have people starting to move back in the Palisades. People are going to rebuild, and you need schools, you need churches, you need parks, you need restaurants, you need stores. If we’re standing and safe and we did everything, let’s be part of that process.”
The first day of school was Tuesday, September 2, which kicked off with a campuswide assembly attended by Councilmember Traci Park—the first spirit day, Downey explained, since the Palisades fire.
Following the Palisades fire, “almost the entirety of the campus”—which houses the church and school—was “safe and relatively unharmed.” There was “smoke and water damage,” and the “only area of significant damage was to the sanctuary,” Lead Pastor Justin Anderson wrote at the time.
Photo courtesy Calvary Christian School
Downey said that Calvary leadership “made a couple really good decisions right out of the gate,” including hiring consulting firm DRS, which he said helped navigate the different insurance policies they had in place at the time of the fire, as well as remediation and construction companies.
They also hired Cotton Global Disaster Solutions, which, over the course of eight months, helped with remediation, beginning with placing “air scrubbers in every office and classroom” at the start to replacing and reconstructing where needed, including new floors, ceilings, insulation, paint and more, Downey explained.
Outside, the preschool play yard, which had wooden structures, burned into the turf, which was replaced. They also “ripped out all the turf throughout campus and replaced it all.”
Though soil testing results were “below the industry standard,” Downey said the school took six inches of dirt out of all the flower beds and replaced it, as well as putting new plants and mulch, since young kids would be near it. They also installed air monitors for PM 2.5 and PM 10.
Downey said the school is down about 30% of its pre-fire enrollment. Previously, there were 300 families: “142 of them lost everything,” Downey said. “Fifteen staff members lost everything, and then 70 families were displaced.”
About a month after the fire, Calvary had reopened at a Santa Monica location to finish out the school year. Now that they’re back in the Palisades, Downey said the school wants to be mindful of the annual events they are planning, with some things being rescheduled or paused, but they will be resuming a “normal calendar for the most part.” Certain things may be planned off-site while work on the sanctuary is underway.
“It’s great for kids to get back to normalcy,” he said. “It’s good for all of us to be back in normalcy and to be back in the rhythms of a normal school year, that’s huge.”
While repair work continues at the sanctuary, Sunday services will take place at the school gym, with baptisms in the sanctuary.
“Even though there’s still a lot of work ahead of us here at Calvary and in the Palisades community, we want to be part of it,” Downey said. “We love this place.”
