After the Wildfires, This High School Needed a Campus. It Found a Sears.

For the foreseeable future, a school that burned during the fires in Los Angeles this year will call a retrofitted Sears home.Students and teachers at Palisades Charter High School have met online since a wildfire swept through Pacific Palisades in January and decimated their school building and many of their homes.On Tuesday, they gathered in person at their school’s temporary new home in nearby Santa Monica, where they hugged, cried and navigated classrooms set up inside the former department store.“After everything we’ve been through — now we have a place to be all of a sudden,” Charlie Speiser, a junior, said.

He had commuted over an hour from Hermosa Beach, where his family is living after having lost their home in the fire.The new facility, located on the busy southern edge of Downtown Santa Monica, is called “Pali South.” It will serve students for the remainder of the school year, and potentially well into the next, depending on the speed of recovery at their Palisades campus.About 40 percent of the campus was destroyed in the fire.The building is a local landmark — a 1947 design by the architect Rowland Crawford, with grooved ivory and green walls.

A large blue Pali High sign now replaces what was a neon green Sears sign above the entrance.Inside, 90 classrooms, a few offices and some communal areas have been constructed using a $10 million insurance payment, as well as donations and school funds.Teachers tried to find ways to make the new building feel more like their old school....