Thoroughly Remediated, Calvary School Reopens September 2

Calvary Head of School Vince Downey (left) and Pastor Justin Anderson stand on the playground (and landscaping) that was redone for this school year.

Calvary School, with students in preschool through eighth grade will start the school year on Tuesday, September 2. The campus, located at 701 Palisades Drive, has been cleaned, remediated and scrubbed and painted from top to bottom click here.

Head of School Vince Downey and Pastor Justin Anderson, whose first day in the office was January 7, remember the day.

“Security reported smoke in the Highlands,” Downey said, and the school put out an alert around 10:50 a.m. for parents to “come pick-up your kids.”

But a mere 10 minutes later, it was decided to evacuate the entire campus of 460 students from two-year-olds to those in Grade 8.

The group initially walked to Fire Station 23, on Sunset Boulevard, but as the fire intensified, the kids and staff next walked to Gladstone’s Restaurant at Sunset and Pacific Coast Highway. The staff stayed with kids until parents arrived: the last student was picked up around 2:30 p.m. Downey said that 15 of his staff lost homes in the fire.

The school has a live nature camera, but on the evening of January 7, instead of mountain lion and deer, it picked up the embers flying around the playing field and scoreboard (which survived).

After the fire, the private Christian School, joined other private schools in making the Water Garden office building in Santa Monica work for classroom instruction.

Calvary’s campus fared better than many of the Palisades private/public schools. There was minimal damage in the preschool area. In the arts/performance area, sets, boards had caught fire. Sprinklers came on, and there was water damage, but most everything else was intact.

Over the past six months, “We removed every flood and carpet and replaced them,”  Downey said. “We ripped out every ceiling and did a thorough cleaning of the HV system and added a Merv 13 filtration system.”

All interior surfaces were repainted. They also replaced all the landscaping/dirt, and the playgrounds and field areas.

“We added twin air monitors on the campus that parents can monitor,” Downey said.

The field was replaced and all of the trees surrounding it have come back.

Between the church and school staff there are about 115 people, 60 for the school, and all are returning this year.

There were 300 families at the school and of those 142 lost their homes. When the school opened in the Santa Monica building, about 30 percent of the students were displaced in different towns or states.

This year the school is expecting between 340-350 students. “It’s great,” Anderson said, about the students who are returning this school year, even though Palisades homes are gone.

Both men attribute it to the fact, that even though the school is about education, it’s much more than that. “We’re family here,” Anderson said.

“We all know this is a special place,” Downey said. “We love this community. Palisades is a special place. We’re glad to be back and we want to be part of the rebuild – whatever that means.”

With the 8-acre campus beautifully redone, the two want to open up the facility because, “we will be one of the few spaces for activities in town.” About 7,000 structures were destroyed in the Palisades Fire.

Already, AYSO is signed up for the field and the Boy Scouts plan to use the gym.

“God protected us,” the pastor said, “we want to use this space as a blessing for the community.”

Downey added, “We want to have the opportunity to be here for the community and to offer this as an oasis.”

They credit the speed of the school’s recovery to Cotton Global Disaster Services (click here.), which specialized in restoration. “They have been integral to our recovery,” Downey said. “They went above and beyond.”

DRS (Delivering Results & Solutions click here.) was hired to help navigate the Fair Plan, four other insurance companies and FEMA.

“Hiring those companies was beneficial,” Downey said. “We wouldn’t be here without them.”

To navigate insurance and restoration while working as a pastor or head of school would have been difficult and delayed recovery. “They took a huge weight off our shoulders,” Downey said.

The campus was lovely and fresh, as teachers were all returning to classrooms on August 20. Downey said, “It feels good to be back, you don’t feel the devastation when you’re on campus. It’s a little bit of a safe haven.”

Since many of the student body have had homes destroyed, the men were asked about how the kids are dealing with the devastation of the fires.

They explained when kids came back to school (at the Water Garden), they were mostly happy to be back with friends and experiencing normality.

And “parents saw how happy kids were when they were back,” Downey said. “Parents found out that kids are more resilient than we give them credit.

“Kids need to be with people who love them,” he said. “They need routine. School provides both.”

Anderson explained that it’s important for people to face hardships and grieve losses. “They can move forward. Grief and hope are best friends,” he said, but “hope requires that people are honest about what we’ve lost.”

There is sadness that not all Palisades schools will be able to open this year. “We need all these schools back, because of school choice,” Downey said.

“We need Pali to rebound,” Anderson said. “We need the stores, the schools, the community to come back.”

The church sanctuary suffered the most significant damage. Firefighters had put out the fire, but it crept back on wood ceiling, and then into the building which triggered the sprinkler system.  The interior with a 700-seat sanctuary, had to be gutted. The stain-glass window survived. Church services are now being held in the gymnasium.

Downey said, “It’s our chance to build it back more beautiful than ever.

The Calvary Church Sanctuary suffered water damage and needed to be gutted. The stained-glass window survived.