When Robert King first learned that he’d be teaching high school in a former Sears department store, he thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” The boxy white building had been sitting vacant for years, but King remembers shopping there in its heyday: He bought his first washer and dryer in the basement roughly 30 years ago.
Last week, King returned to the basement of the Santa Monica Sears, this time to teach history classes. Palisades Charter High School, where he’s worked for decades, is using the space as a temporary campus after parts of theirs were destroyed in the Palisades Fire in early January.
Tucked between the end of the 10 freeway and the Third Street Promenade, the Sears building dates back to 1947. It’s landmarked by the city of Santa Monica, which means the original signage is still on the facade along with floor-to-ceiling windows for retail displays. After the store closed in 2017, it was gutted and redeveloped as office space. But by the time the project was completed, less than a year into the pandemic, offices had mostly gone the way of department stores.
The front entrance of the new Palisades High campus is complete with a new sign (the original signage is still on the side of the building). Photo by Jennifer Swann.
The building is industrial and warehouse-like. The floors are concrete, and exposed pipes wrap around the high ceilings. Pali High has added newer, softer touches: blue carpeting in the atrium and classrooms, sound-proofing blankets to cover the spaces between the walls and the ceilings, and geometric murals painted in the school’s blue color scheme.
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Still, it couldn’t be more different from Pali’s old campus, which was sprawling and surrounded by trees and grass. Perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, it had an outdoor pool and looked like the quintessential Southern California high school. It even played one in movies like Freaky Friday and Carrie, and TV shows like Modern Family and Teen Wolf.
“It’s a very iconic LA high school filming location,” says senior Casey Scaduto. In films and TV shows, she says, “you can see the big grass area in the middle is a nice gathering area where the whole school comes together.”
Today, even the buildings at Pali High that are still standing are contaminated with ash. The damage was made worse by a previous crisis, just a few years back.
“During COVID or right afterward, we installed these exhaust fans. To run them, your windows are open, so almost every classroom, their windows were open during the fires,” says King. “Because the winds were blowing so much, it almost worked as suction and pulled all the ash and whatnot into the rooms.”
Nearly everything inside the classrooms will likely need to be thrown out as a result – including the wall-to-wall posters King had acquired over more than 30 years as a teacher. He’s also expecting to lose all the props he used for history lessons: busts of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and a bobblehead of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“I keep telling myself I've made peace with it, but I'm not quite sure until I actually get to walk into my [old] classroom what that feeling's going to be,” says King, who donned a Pali High baseball cap and t-shirt and a collection of historical buttons pinned to his houndstooth blazer for the first day of school. (He says he owns buttons from every presidential election dating back to 1896.)
In the wake of the fire, King and his wife Andrea, a librarian at Pali High, turned their home in Westchester into a makeshift donation center. They filled their garage and their adult children’s former bedrooms with boxes of books and school supplies. Many of them were donated from schools all over the state.
Earlier this month, the Kings moved those boxes into the former Sears building. Some of their students showed up on Easter Sunday, two days before classes started, to help sort supplies — basics like pencils and staplers — and distribute them to every classroom.
The students also made chalk drawings and paper signs to help navigate the building, including the parts of it that are still being arranged. “Library, starts Friday” one sign reads. It’s written in marker and taped on an empty white wall, above a stack of cardboard boxes. In chalk, they scrawled King’s old room number — F104 — on the wall outside his new space, as a reminder of their old campus.
Students work in a lounge area on the second-floor atrium, with natural light streaming in from a skylight. Photo by Jennifer Swann.
After fire scorched the old campus, the school hosted classes online for months. “It was a total flashback to quarantine,” says Scaduto, who spent her middle school years online at the beginning of the pandemic. “Zoom school can really make you more isolated, and it can drain you.”
Scaduto, an opinion editor at Pali campus newspaper The Tideline, says some students moved away or transferred schools, not knowing how long it would take to reopen a campus elsewhere. “I think a lot of people didn’t want to play the waiting game,” she says.
But Scaduto, like more than 2,000 of her peers, stuck it out, even as her own family is displaced from their fire-damaged home.
The new campus is still a work in progress, and the transition has had its bumps. There are crowded stairwells and cramped hallways, students who struggle to navigate the building, and on the first day, the Internet hadn’t yet been installed.
A makeshift counseling office, labeled with paper signs and chalk drawings, is in the basement of the Sears building. Photo by Jennifer Swann.
But mostly, students are thrilled to be back in person and to see their friends again. And, as sophomore Jackson Richmond put it, the unusual circumstances have given them a lot to talk about.
“It’s just pretty strange that we're going to an old department store,” he says after class. “I think it's an experience that not many people have and it's a story to tell.”
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