On Tuesday, officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District announced when they expect the rebuilding of the schools destroyed by the Palisades Fire will be completed.
$600 million has been set aside to rebuild and repair Marquez Elementary, Palisades Charter Elementary, and Palisades Charter High, with the two elementary schools set to be completed in the fall of 2028.
“However, I believe we can do better, and we will take full advantage of the flexibilities established by the state,” LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. “We'll put internal pressures, our own processes, to expedite the work, and I would love to beat that expected timeline of fall of 2028.”
As for students of Pali High, they’ll will leave their temporary campus at the old Sears building in Santa Monica and return to the original campus on January 27th. Temporary classrooms have been set up to make up for the ones lost in the fire.
Carlos Torres, director of the Office of Environmental Health & Safety at LAUSD, said a lot has already gone into making the campuses safe.
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“0We cleaned everything and [did] full industrial cleaning and environmental cleanups of every single campus,” he said. “This campus in particular, obviously, there were new portable buildings. They were even sampled because they were on campus for months as they were being built, and so we did assessments of those as we did at Pali High School.”
Advanced air quality monitors have been installed on the campuses
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