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Teachers, Students Reconstruct Learning Environment After Camp Fire

Tricia Etchison has been through plenty of fire seasons, but she knew the Camp Fire might be different when it started raining ash on her car.

“I noticed flakes of ashes, leaf sized flakes. Small cinders or small, like, briquettes,” she said.

Etchison is a 5th grade teacher at Achieve Charter School in Paradise. As the fire spread, teachers like Etchison piled students into cars. Etchison shared a ride with an administrator, her granddaughter and several students. Another one of her grandkids, Gracie, is a sixth-grader at the school and evacuated with seven or eight of her classmates.
“We had like little kids," Gracie said. "And they were like reading books and ... we had one teenager in the front seat, so like she was like reading all these things and like she's like crying ... and that's how most of us got scared.”

Her friend Bethany was in another car. Bethany said the students and teachers met up in the Raley’s parking lot in Chico.

“And then we got a call saying our house was completely gone," she said.

Almost all of Achieve’s staff members lost their homes that day. They think that over 90 percent of their students did too. Teachers, students and administrators are still figuring out how to recover from the fire.

 

Butte County Superintendent of Schools, Tim Taylor, said the hardest thing was having teachers who lost everything and were victims, teach victims.

“I think having that trauma preparation took yeoman's effort,” Taylor said.

In the six weeks since the Camp Fire, the county has managed to find temporary sites for Paradise’s schools and also helped thousands of educators attend trauma trainings. Taylor said the district should expect bigger changes—particularly once the portables they ordered get here, and once some state and federal funding starts to come through.

“When you have 4,700 new homeless people, that qualifies you for a new world," he said. "It is a huge change on serving food and in getting the right services to all the kids.”

But for now, teachers and students are making do with the county and state-level resources that have been provided.

Back at Achieve Charter School, students are running through the halls of Chico’s Life Church with cake and toys. It’s the last day of school before winter break, and the school is hosting an epic toy drive. Gracie, Bethany and a few other students are hanging out near the school’s de facto office. Achieve has been holding classes in Life Church for about two and a half weeks. For students like Bethany, it’s been an adjustment.

“A lot of people have left. Like it went from a class of 30 to a class of like 19 in some classes," she said. "Everything's like confusing and it's like 'Where to have to ask where the bathroom is?' at our own school.”

In addition to adjusting to the new facilities, the school has taken steps to ensure that students' trauma is addressed. Teachers like Tricia Etchison have fundamentally restructured the school day:

“The afternoon was set aside for a movie downtime, drawing, coloring anything that just lets the kids relax," Etchison said. "I knew in my mind that in a stressful situation I tend to get sleepy. And so I purchased some pillows and blankets and I had this little room that the students were allowed to come in if they need to take a nap.”

 

That flexible schedule works better for teachers too. Everyone is dealing with housing instability. Teachers are meeting with insurance adjusters, or looking at apartments or in some cases, commuting for up to two hours to work.

Achieve’s community has gone to great lengths to support each other. It was cathartic for Etchison to see the children she evacuated with again and she said she has mixed feelings about going on break.

“I know myself personally I don't want to leave because I want to be with these guys. But I also know I need some time for myself to regroup," she said.

Etchison supposes everyone could use the rest—and when the students come back in January, they’ll have their work cut out for them.