Marquez Charter Elementary School in Pacific Palisades has welcomed students back to temporary classrooms on its original site for the second year in a row, with families displaced by the January 2025 fire returning to bungalows on the same ground where the fire destroyed most of the original school but spared three classrooms. The milestone caps a recovery effort shaped in part by families' preference for a quick return.
According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, at least a dozen schools across the footprint of the Eaton and Palisades fires were destroyed or damaged, and the most severely affected campuses remain closed. Marquez was among the hardest hit, and its return to its original Pacific Palisades site has become a visible example of a public school community's recovery. Parents advocated for the school's return.
A Fast Return Shaped by Parent Preference
Marquez students and staff spent the remainder of the 2024–25 school year roughly 10 miles from Pacific Palisades, sharing space with Nora Sterry Elementary School in Sawtelle after the fire forced them out, a relocation first detailed by the Los Angeles Times in January 2025. Less than nine months later, on September 30, 2025, Marquez became the first public school destroyed by the fires to resume classes on its original campus, using temporary portable bungalows while permanent construction is planned.
An April 2025 district survey found that more than 45% of responding Marquez parents wanted an immediate return to a Pacific Palisades site rather than staying off-site indefinitely, according to LA School Report. Those responses helped shape the Los Angeles Unified School District's decision to build the bungalows rather than keep families displaced for years while permanent construction proceeds. Parents also advocated for reopening, per the Times report.
Enrollment Down Nearly 60 Percent
The toll on the student body has been severe. By September 2025, enrollment at Marquez had dropped roughly 58%, from about 310 students before the fire to 130, with LAUSD estimating that 75% of the remaining students were living outside Pacific Palisades, the Los Angeles Times reported. The return came despite that demographic upheaval.
The scale of the financial commitment behind the rebuild is substantial. In June 2025, the LAUSD Board of Education approved a $604 million plan to rebuild Marquez, Palisades Charter Elementary, and Palisades Charter High School, funded initially through a $9 billion voter-approved local school bond, according to LAist. LA School Report put the cost of the temporary campus, along with the larger rebuild, at roughly $202.6 million. Construction across the three campuses is expected to finish by the end of 2028, meaning the bungalows now in use are a multi-year bridge rather than a short-term fix.
A Smaller School for a Changed Neighborhood
Even the permanent campus will look different from the one that burned. Under LAUSD's approved rebuild plan, Marquez will be reconstructed with 22 classrooms, down from its pre-fire count of 37, LAist reported, reflecting broader demographic trends and declining enrollment across the district that the fire accelerated rather than caused.
Before students moved back onto the site, LAUSD conducted soil and air testing and continued environmental monitoring, addressing concerns about wildfire ash and contamination on a campus built where the fire once burned. That regulatory groundwork underpinned the reopening even as the neighborhood around the school remains far from recovered.
The broader neighborhood recovery is still underway. As of late September, roughly three out of four survivors of the January 2025 Palisades Fire remained displaced from their homes, according to Hoodline's reporting on volunteer rebuilding efforts in the neighborhood. The campus itself stands as an early, visible symbol of the community's return.
