“Welcome back”: Community turns out as Palisades High reopens

As Palisades Charter High School reopened Tuesday, alumni and longtime residents turned out alongside parents and school staff, many saying they wanted to be there for a moment that felt bigger than the first day of school.

“We don’t have much of a community left,” said Tolley Casparis, a Palisades High alumna who graduated in 1982. “This is our first big moment of the community coming home.”

Casparis gestured toward the surrounding neighborhood, much of it still bearing scars from last year’s wildfire. With students returning to campus, she said, the morning felt like a rare sign of forward movement in a place still grappling with loss.

“The kids are coming home,” she said, smiling broadly as she called out “welcome back” to students as they walked past.

Around her, dozens of community members lingered along the street with coffee handed out by volunteers, hugging old friends, calling out familiar names and answering a steady chorus of car horns with cheers and applause as students made their way toward campus, backpacks slung over their shoulders.

For David Card, a member of Palisades Charter High School’s first graduating class of 1963, being there Tuesday morning was about supporting the students and seeing a campus he’s known for decades come back to life.

“I wanted to support the kids and say hi to the kids,” Card said. “It’s a big day for them to move back after the fire and everything.”

When asked what he was most excited to see again, Card didn’t hesitate.

“The quad,” he said. “The center of the campus.”

Card, a landscape designer and head of the Palisades Forestry Committee, said he has a particular fondness for two trees near the center of campus — one of which blooms bright red each spring — that survived the fire.

Nearby, Nick Melvoin, who represents the Palisades area on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, watched as students returned to campus.

“One of the things I love about today is it feels like a normal day on campus,” Melvoin said. “But Pali High is the largest employer in the Palisades, so as a real sign of recovery, having this anchor tenant back is huge for the local businesses, the homeowners who are excited to see some activity back and a sense of normalcy.”

He said the scale of the return – and how soon it came after the fire – makes the moment especially meaningful for the neighborhood.

“It’s an incredibly exciting day,” Melvoin said. “We are only just a few weeks beyond a year after the fires, and to have this high school back, 2,500 kids, is an incredible milestone for the recovery of this community.”