Having lived in Altadena my whole life, I watched as the Eaton Fire ripped through many beloved community spaces, schools, and homes in January earlier this year. Mine were among them.
When two friends and I drove down a month ago to see the damage, there wasn’t much left of our childhood. On the north side of the campus, a mural of children playing stands. We had painted it in kindergarten as a collaborative piece between all grades. On the east side of the campus, our 5th-grade wall survived. Our 2016 class each painted leaves on a vine with our names, which was continued by every 5th-grade class after ours. With two of my closest childhood friends, we stood outside the gates to both murals and counted how many names we could read.
Shadowed by the grief of losing my home, it was only recently that I got to visit my old school, Aveson School of Leaders. Aveson Charter Schools has two campuses in Altadena—an elementary school campus and a middle and high school campus. I went through both for the entirety of my K–12 education, accompanied by a handful of committed friends. Aveson, a public charter, was created to follow a learner-centered education model with our own spin called “Personalized Mastery Learning.” Our families had bought into this model from the start, and as we grew up, it did too. Over the years, the vision and execution shifted, but the close-knit relationships with our peers and teachers never changed.
“A bunch of people from our graduating class recently got on a call together and we took a minute to meditate. We used to do that practice all throughout high school. It reminded me that community is more than a physical place, but the lasting connections and support of our friendships impact the way we show up in this world,” says Laura Fisher, one of the former Aveson students who lost her house. “The fire didn’t take that away.”
In 2019, I went to my first SparkHouse event with Education Reimagined in Washington, DC. I noticed that among all the diverse learning environments, we shared a closeness and sincerity with our peers that my friends at traditional schools have not felt.
With a cohort of my peers from my graduating class, we gather on a Zoom call every few months to check in. We understand that going to a learner-centered school gave us a unique experience—and oftentimes, a difficult one to transition from into universities—but we shared that experience together.
In my junior year of high school, I started working at the after-school program at Aveson. A few times per week, I would return to my beloved elementary school and play, teach, and learn alongside the Kindergarten to 5th-grade students. It quickly became one of the places I learned the most about education, restorative justice, and bringing art to young people. It was one of my favorite places to be.
For the next two years, and over many summer camps, I worked at the elementary school, and watched how the kids still played the games we invented, tended to the garden we grew from an empty plot, and walked past our murals every day. Occasionally, I’d surprise one of them by pointing out the little jump-roping girl I had painted.
“I came back to Altadena looking for answers… some kind of closure. What I found was nothing where a whole lot used to be,” said Graham Leahy, after visiting the campus with me after the fire. The two of us attended and worked at Aveson together over our thirteen years there. “But from nothing, I can only hope the people will come back and turn it into something special again.”
The same day we returned to our burned and rubble school, we met two of our former teachers for lunch. It’s now been two years since most of us left Altadena for college, but the scene was so familiar: sharing a meal at our favorite childhood restaurant, with familiar people, and familiar conversation. Those teachers, and so many others, taught us how to do something with what we’re feeling.
But there’s so much that didn’t burn. I find home in the memories of hiking up the mountains Altadena is hugged between, sliding down the waterfall staircases through our campus, and the poetry we’d share with each other.
Amelia Namita Pinto
In fourth grade, my favorite teacher taught a unit around the guiding question, “How can we make Altadena a better place?” We posted up a canvas and paint at a local cafe—now burned from the fire—and asked community members to contribute to the collaborative art piece. This month, I made a collaborative art show processing the fire with some of those same classmates. Sometimes these lessons and learning feel so subtle that I find them again in different moments of life.
Throughout the grieving process, long calls with friends, letters from teachers, and the hope of the current elementary school kids remind me that Altadena is in the people, too. They lifted me up when I had little strength to articulate how I’m feeling, and continue to show up with reciprocity and love unconditionally.
It’s hard to describe the enormity of what we went through together. At first, it was going to school together for thirteen years. That alone is a turbulent process that requires a lot of compassion, commitment, and flexibility. But it was also navigating a global pandemic, in which we’d play virtual games between every class and spend hours six feet away at the park. Then, we protested outside of our school gates through two elections and political turmoil that felt direct to our community. Now, we share each other’s GoFundMe pages with kind words about how each other’s families have helped raise us.
One of the key pillars of Aveson’s pedagogy is reflection. We’d write reflection essays to show mastery and to progress from one stage of education to the next. Naturally, I find so many of my peers reflecting on our school now. To watch a place burn that was a home for thirteen years brings up a lot of feelings. But there’s so much that didn’t burn. I find home in the memories of hiking up the mountains Altadena is hugged between, sliding down the waterfall staircases through our campus, and the poetry we’d share with each other.
I’m holding on to that feeling by fully immersing myself in our local art, mutual aid efforts, and honoring and archiving the legacy of a special place.
This month, four of my closest friends are visiting me in college to put together an exhibit and show for Altadena. They responded quickly to the call—I needed their support and their art, and they have never let me down. This accountability is what has held me throughout moving away from Altadena—and then, returning to the ruins. My community knows me. And I know, in return, that I will continue to learn, to advocate, and to write for them.
Aveson has these eight guiding principles that I’ve memorized since I could read. One of them is, “Our growth together requires us to grow individually.” We used to scoff at the circular language that we couldn’t wrap our minds around at six. But now, they feel more fitting than ever. All I have left of Aveson are the murals that started and ended my time there, and the collective memory we hold on to tightly.
This community has given me the perspective to see what we need from and for each other to recover. Our commitment to our stories, relationships, and home have been strengthened since the fire and are creating new opportunities to honor our learning and ourselves. After all we’ve navigated together before, I couldn’t imagine going through this with anyone else.
