Pali High to Begin School Year at Sears Building

LAUSD Hosted Three Design Concept Community Meetings for Palisades Charter Schools

By SARAH SHMERLING and LILY TINOCO

Palisades Charter High School will begin the 2025-26 academic year at its temporary campus in Santa Monica at a renovated Sears building, officials announced on June 18.

“After thoughtful consideration and multiple visits to our Palisades campus, we’ve determined that the best place to kick off the 2025-26 school year will be our Pali South campus in Santa Monica,” Pali High Executive Director/Principal Dr. Pam Magee wrote in a message sent to the school community. “This move allows us the time and space needed to continue restoration work on our main campus, while ensuring that our students and staff can start the year in a safe, fully functional learning environment.”

Pali High, which sustained damage in the Palisades fire, will remain at the Santa Monica space at least through Thanksgiving break, according to Magee, with a possibility of through the end of the first semester. The temporary campus first opened in April.

“Our goal is to return to the Palisades with as little disruption as possible to teaching and learning,” Magee said. “In the meantime, restoration work is well underway—focusing on key shared spaces like the football field, gym and aquatic center—so they may possibly be ready for community use even before we return.”

Ahead of the announcement from Pali High, Los Angeles Unified School District hosted a series of three design concept community meetings June 4 to 6 regarding the charter school campuses damaged in the Palisades fire: Pali High, Marquez Charter Elementary School and Palisades Charter Elementary School.

“The January 2025 Palisades fire caused an unprecedented loss of facilities due to fire damage, with significant impacts to Marquez Charter Elementary School, Palisades Charter Elementary School and Palisades Charter High School,” read a slide from LAUSD. “The proposed projects have been developed to expedite the repopulation of the affected schools. These projects replace facilities that were destroyed at each school. Both temporary and permanent facilities will be constructed to serve the student populations that were present prior to the fire at each school.”

The projects at Marquez and Pali Elementary will be “funded by the category of need for major modernizations, upgrades and reconfigurations to school campuses,” LAUSD continued.

During the meetings, the LAUSD facilities team, as well as the contracted architect for each school, led a “discussion of the preliminary design for the rebuild” of the schools.

The Pali Elementary meeting took place on June 4, with Practice: an “award-winning architecture firm based in Pasadena,” which is “nationally recognized for its innovative, sustainable and community-centered design.” They work alongside Hongjoo Kim Landscape Architects.

The scope of the project at Pali Elementary includes to “restore and repair intact buildings with upgrades for reoccupancy,” 16 new classrooms (nine general, five kindergarten/TK and two flexible/makerspace), administrative spaces, multipurpose room, and maintenance facilities.

The proposed permanent multipurpose room would be larger than the auditorium at about 3,000 square feet, according to the presentation. It would have more seating, could be used for indoor dining, would offer more storage, and would have “pipe grid stage lighting and built-in projector with motorized projection screen.”

What Practice reported hearing ahead of the meeting from the community regarding the rebuild included maximizing open space and connectivity, restoring a “community resource and social anchor,” constructing a “resilient school for future generations,” and respecting the “historic resource, while promoting a forward-looking vision.”

During the meeting, Practice presented three potential “schemes,” with the first focused on a two-story, linear building, with “one big open space.” Scheme two focused on “interwoven landscapes” and scheme three on “garden courts.”

Pali Elementary will remain at Brentwood Elementary Science Magnet while its home campus is rebuilt, according to information from Councilmember Traci Park’s office.

The Pali High meeting took place on June 5, where DLR Group was introduced.

“For over 25 years, DLR Group has been a trusted partner to LAUSD, and has collaborated with schools and communities to create learning environments that are not only safe and sustainable, but truly transformational,” according to information shared by the group.

During the June 5 meeting, attendees previewed a preliminary design and were invited to provide feedback, which the architectural team said will use to further refine the concept.

“Tonight is our first meeting,” LAUSD FSD-Community Relations Director Lorena Padilla-Melendez said. “We will be hosting a community meeting to bring you a more developed design sometime in July … Come fall of 2025, we will come back, and at that time, the architectural team will present the final design for the permanent structures on your campus.”

The Pali High project scope includes 22 new classrooms (16 general, one flexible science lab, one flexible engineering, one media and filmmaking, and others) as well as administrative and support spaces. The track and football field, baseball field, field lighting, and ancillary buildings will be replaced.

There will be “interim classrooms during design and construction” of the permanent spaces, including about 29 portable classrooms, five administrative portables and three portable restroom units.

DLR described its project goals and guiding principles as: “belonging, resilience and sustainability.” The firm planned to “foster social connection through layered indoor/outdoor gathering spaces,” while designing with “fire-adaptive materials, passive systems and flexible structures.”

The series of design concept meetings concluded on Friday, June 6, with Marquez, which will be working with NAC: a “national leader in K-12 educational design and architecture.” NAC has designed educational facilities in 32 states, according to the presentation. The firm has worked on Malibu High and Playa Vista Elementary school campuses.

The project scope for Marquez includes 22 new classrooms (15 general classrooms, four kindergarten/TK, two flexible learning spaces and a parent center), administrative spaces, a multipurpose room, library (2,000 square feet, designed for approximately 6,000 books), food services and maintenance facilities. There will also be infrastructure upgrades, which include utilities, landscape and parking improvements.

NAC’s design and planning principals include to “restore Marquez campus culture,” “child-scale, minimize height and two-story structures,” and have “indoor/outdoor connection.”

Key decision points, according to the presentation, will include the location of kindergarten and TK, location of the library/makerspace, scale of circulation/gathering, strategies to negotiate topography, campus access/service access, and character of play/outdoor spaces.

Three concepts NAC discussed during the meeting were The Secret Garden (a “protected, outdoor play/learn space”), The Front Porch (a “covered indoor/outdoor zone running the length of the building”) and The Village Green (a “snaking roof” that “ties together cozy clusters”).

Marquez is slated to reopen in the Palisades this fall, according to Park’s office. The campus will have portable classrooms on site, as well as administration and a library in portables, a mobile kitchen with shaded lunch area, and three portable restroom units, LAUSD said.

During all three meetings, there was a time for stakeholders to pose questions to LAUSD and the architect firms.

Next steps for all three campuses include a design update community meeting with a “more detailed design concept,” where additional community input will be collected, slated for summer 2025. A final design community meeting is projected to take place in fall 2025, with a pre-construction meeting estimated for the beginning of 2027 and reoccupation by the end of 2028, according to the slides.

LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin spoke on the projected timeline during the Pali Elementary meeting.

“We—as we discussed when we started meeting with you all a few months ago—are doing everything we can to expedite this process,” Melvoin said. “The superintendent and I have been meeting weekly about this. We are on bi-weekly calls with the governor and his team, who has committed to expediting and waiving whatever they can.”