Tucked within the pages of The Temple News’ final edition of the school year, distributed on Tuesday, April 29, readers will find a very special section. The reporting in this section isn’t focused on Temple’s students or happenings from its North Philly campus. Rather, these pages include stories, opinions, poems and artwork from California middle and high school students affected by the wildfires in January.
Palisades Charter High School and the Pasadena Rosebud Academy Charter School, which serves kindergarten through eighth-grade students, were both burned down during the Palisades and Eaton wildfires.
“The Palisades wildfire destroyed 40% of our campus, including our newsroom and all of our equipment. One-fourth of staff members lost their homes, everyone lost their school community and many people lost a sense of safety,” said Lisa Nehus Saxon, a teacher at Palisades Charter and advisor to the school’s student-run newspaper, Tidelines. “But thanks to Temple University and The Temple News, we kept hope alive.”
Saxon’s longtime friend, Claire Smith, assistant professor of journalism at Temple and founding executive director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media, heard about the destruction from the fires and reached out. Saxon and Smith’s friendship began more than 40 years ago, when the pair were blazing trails as two of the only women reporters at the time covering Major League Baseball.
“She sent a picture of what used to be the newspaper office, where decades of student newspapers, photos, equipment and everything was just burnt up,” Smith said. “It occurred to me that maybe Temple could at least give some sense of closure to the students who worked on that newspaper. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if The Temple News could put physical evidence that this newspaper is still alive.”
Smith approached Samuel O’Neal, editor-in-chief of The Temple News, and John DiCarlo, the student-run newspaper’s faculty advisor, who both agreed to partner with the schools. O’Neal then began working with students and faculty in California on the special edition of the paper.
“I wanted them to be able to tell the stories that they wanted to tell, so I didn’t police it too much,” O’Neal said.
The 10-page special insert has a sports section, a news section and a “People of Pali” section dedicated to sharing stories about the wildfires. Flipping through the pages, readers will find opinion pieces and feature articles on topics like politics in the classroom and price gouging in the rental market following the wildfires.
One story details Palisades Charter’s return to in-person learning, which happened on April 22 as students, faculty and staff gathered in makeshift classrooms constructed in a former Sears department store. For some students, it was their first time seeing their friends and peers in-person since Dec. 19.
Other stories cover the outpouring of support that the Palisades Charter community has received in the wake of the fire. Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, visited with Palisades Charter’s baseball team. Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors and a Palisades Charter alum, invited the boys’ basketball team to a Warriors-Lakers game in February.
But 30 miles northeast of Palisades, another community was building back from the wildfire damage. Smith felt that this community’s resilience warranted more coverage.
“I read a lot about the fires in a portion of LA called Altadena,” Smith said. “It’s a historic part of LA that’s occupied by a large African American population, and this population goes back several generations.”
Altadena lost five schools to the Eaton wildfire, including the Rosebud Academy. Out of the school’s 150 students, faculty and staff, 40 families lost their homes. Smith reached out to the school’s founder, Shawn Brown, to invite Rosebud students to participate in the collaboration. They agreed, and the latest edition of The Temple News includes the students’ poems, artwork and personal essays about how the fire affected them.
“We searched long and hard for a school in Altadena to represent a community that I felt was underrepresented in the national and local coverage,” Smith said. “I just felt it was important that the most diverse university in a major city, Temple, took care of the people that were impacted by this.”
The edition also includes an essay written by Brown, who lost her home to the fire.
“In the wake of the Eaton fire, which devastated our school campus, the need to rebuild is more urgent than ever,” Brown wrote. “Our students deserve a state-of-the-art facility that reflects the excellence and promise of their futures. Rebuilding isn’t just about replacing what was lost, it’s about moving forward stronger, with renewed purpose and an even greater commitment to educational equity and opportunity.”
O’Neal will visit the California schools on May 14 to hand deliver physical editions of the newspaper. The Temple News typically prints 2,000 copies of its editions, but it printed 2,500 of this special edition.
“This has reminded me that there are people that are going through hard things, real hard things, like losing their school and losing their homes,” O’Neal said. “These students have had to sit through Zoom classes, live in hotels and motels, and sleep in a number of different beds over the last few months. I’m really proud of the work they did and glad we were able to collaborate on this.”
“Journalism is not just a profession or someone’s passion, we are part of a family that goes from kindergarten all the way up to CBS and the Pulitzer family. We take care of each other,” Smith added. “We’re built to notice, and to record and to report on situations like this, especially when it impacts children and you see how brave and resilient they are. They’re still living in motels, but they put out a newspaper today with Sam’s help, and Temple couldn’t be prouder.”
The Temple News is an award-winning, student-run newspaper that has been serving the Temple community since 1921. Physical copies of The Temple News can be found in newspaper boxes around Temple’s campus. The digital version can be found on The Temple News website.