Animo Jefferson Charter Middle School’s (AJCMS) campus was closed on Wednesday January 8 due to the harmful air quality. AJCMS students were evacuated from the building. Parents were notified by the office to pick up students.
Many wildfires erupted on Wednesday that caused most of the schools near the fires and smoke to shut down for the rest of the week. In the Palisades fire about 23,713 acres were burned. 16,255 structures were burned down due to the fire causing many people to lose their homes and jobs.
“Our priority was to make sure that everyone was safe so we treated it as an emergency, at a state of emergency, so we had all of your parents come and pick you up,” Area Superintendent Xochitl Avellan said, “We didn’t just let you go because of the quality of the air.”
Parents/Guardians were being called by Mr. Flota, the principal of AJMS, to pick up kids from their second period classes. The security guards were escorting students through the halls to meet with their parents/guardians.
Assistant Principal Ms. Perez said, “I think that some of you guys have seen probably Alex or Miles come through some head counts so that we would know how many people we had in the school building. We had an idea. Mr. Flota started to talk to all the different adults, so we talked to security, to the office, who’s going to call parents, how are we going to tell them. We had to think about where all your parents could wait for you.”
Alex and Miles, the security guards, were the ones to escort parents/guardians into the gym and into the line. Other security guards were handling traffic outside the school.
“One big challenge, probably the biggest thing, that I think Miles could share with you what they did because they were at the front line outside to make sure that everything was ordered and that your parents were safe. And, that you were safe to be picked up to go out in traffic out there so I can only imagine what chaos with all those cars,” Perez said.
School staff discovered during evacuations that many parents had not updated their emergency contacts. This was a big challenge for the school because office staff had to find another way to contact parents.
“Some parents have not updated their emergency contacts and their phone numbers, so I know that was another challenge where if that didn’t go through then the office had to call and find a way to communicate with your parents that we were requesting for them to come and pick that so that’s another challenge,” Avellan stated.
Once only a few students remained to be picked up, they were moved into one classroom to keep them together. The school kept calling their parents who had different work schedules or parents whose calls were not going through.
“It was down to about 30 students. We moved everybody to one classroom and then we just kept calling some parents who have different work schedules,” Perez stated. “Like some people work night shifts so they sleep during the day so some of those parents didn’t have the phone calls going through.”
The school had to close and their communication went out to the other nearby Green Dot schools. Everyone was out of the school by 12:30 p.m.
“We needed to go ahead and close and communication went out immediately to the schools and we took action and everyone was out by 12:30 p.m,” Avellan said.
