Fire-damaged Palisades High seeks temporary home in old Santa Monica Sears building

The old Sears building in Santa Monica is being eyed as the temporary home of Palisades Charter High School, which was damaged in the Palisades fire in early January, school leaders disclosed at a Tuesday board meeting.

School administrators briefly acknowledged the ongoing negotiations during a meeting of the school’s board of directors, who stressed that a deal had not yet been reached.

“I won’t say a lot about the temporary relocation, because we have more to talk about later,” said the school’s executive director and principal, Pamela Magee. “But I do want to assure everyone we’re working on that, that we had a little bit of a delay, because, as with many things that deal with contracts, things sometimes come up. We’re working through it. We think that we’ll get it all resolved quickly.”

Administrators and board members hope that students can return to the Palisades High property as soon as the fall, using portable buildings as well as the 70% of the campus that did not catch fire.

Officials have also discussed the possibility of holding this year’s graduation at the still standing football stadium.

The Sears building closed in 2017, and a $50-million office and retail makeover was ready to go in 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a difficult period for such ventures. The complex has enough room for a high school with a pre-fire enrollment of 3,000 students, an indication of the site’s available space.

The vacant Sears store in Santa Monica, seen in 2020, had recently undergone a makeover to turn the Art Deco-style building into an office, restaurant and retail complex.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Magee recently estimated the post-fire enrollment at about 2,700. The location will be farther from the homes of people who lived in the Palisades, but many of those residents are scattered around the L.A. area after losing their houses to the fire. The school also has had a large proportion of students who commuted from outside the attendance area.

California

The Palisades fire burned their high school. Now students face COVID-style, remote learning

Palisades Charter High School, damaged in this month’s firestorm, reopened online Tuesday. But many students dreaded the Zoom classes after enduring them amid the pandemic.

Jan. 23, 2025

Pali High students began their spring semester online on Jan. 23. These students had earlier experienced the difficult period of remote learning during the pandemic, and many have spoken of the importance of returning to in-person learning.

Unlike the pandemic shutdown, students are still gathering for sports and social and other activities off campus. On Tuesday, they celebrated a win by the girls water polo team.

The fire left behind complicated situations to sort out. As one example, teachers want to know when it is safe to return to the intact, but smoke-and-ash impacted main structure to retrieve belongings — before a deep cleaning results in items being removed and thrown away.

Back-campus buildings destroyed by fire have been cleared away, leaving flat ground that one administrator described as safe to walk on — even if the campus itself is not nearly ready to reopen.

Pali High is an independent charter school run by its own board of directors. The school has always operated out of a property owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District, which ran the school before it broke off from the district.

As an independent charter, Pali’s leaders have both the opportunity and responsibility to manage the challenging recovery without the school district telling them what to do. Both Pali and the school system are working together to return the campus to good condition, officials on both sides have said.

The particulars of the negotiations with the owners of the Sears property were a main topic of a closed-door Pali board session that lasted for about 90 minutes. Real estate negotiations can be legally discussed in closed session.

“We definitely plan to have more communication out,” Magee said. “I know sometimes people feel like, why hasn’t there been more information? But again, just trying to make sure we have i’s dotted and t’s crossed.”

She added there would soon be information about the new location and how the return to in-person learning would unfold.

“We’re developing all of these things as we go but we’re working on it every day and trying to make this happen as quickly as possible,” Magee said.

The hoped-for temporary location is a notable refurbished structure, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy.

“When Sears, Roebuck and Company built its Santa Monica department store in 1947, it did so at an interesting time for commercial development,” noted a write-up by the Conservancy. “Shopping areas were starting to shift away from pedestrian-oriented storefronts with designs tailored to walking, moving toward automobile-oriented centers with large parking lots and façades for catching the motorist’s eye.”

The Sears building, designed by noted local architect Rowland Crawford, “managed to capture that time of transition [and] the era’s feeling of optimism and growth, with a large scale and stylish architectural touches that advertised Sears as a forward-looking company.”