For these student reporters, covering the Eaton Fire was personal
They may just be starting out, but student journalists in Pasadena are not backing down from covering history happening in their backyard.
Journalists from Marshall Fundamental, a 6th-to-12th-grade school in the Pasadena Unified School District, produced a special 16-page edition of their paper, the “Eagle Eye,” weeks after returning to a smoke-damaged campus, and realizing they stood in the middle of the biggest story of the year.
Two “Eagle Eye” staff members lost their homes in the blaze, joining more than 1,000 school families out of 14,000 district families and about 1,400 staff and faculty out of 3,000 directly affected by the Eaton Fire.
They wrote editorials on the Pasadena mayor’s response to the disaster, examined early possible causes of the fire, and curated photos of what students grabbed while fleeing to evacuate. Alumni wrote guest editorials about their wildfire experience.
Journalism Adviser Sang Lee said teachers were advised to ease students back and focus on their mental health on Jan. 30, when Marshall reopened. This also meant no rigorous academics.
But the first words out of student David Chavarria’s mouth that first day was, “What are we going to do about the fire?”
“They were eager to start,” Lee said.
David, 16, of Pasadena and his co-editor-in-chief Noah Castillo, 17, of Altadena said they knew they couldn’t ignore reporting on people they know who lost their homes.
“It was a personal matter but it had to be touched on,” David said.
Photographer and editorial editor Elizabeth Merriam, 17, was cognizant of what she was ready to do for the newspaper after losing her family home, where she was born, in Altadena.
“I ended up collecting all these photos and curating them because it was too hard for me to write a narrative of what happened,” she said. “It was too personal. It was easier for me to deal with the photos.”
Brenna Henley, 16, produced a section in the paper featuring things students saved from the fire. She herself grabbed her Canon camera before evacuating. She also took photos of the fire on her street. Her family home is gone.
“The items that I grabbed, such as my camera, are each a little part of me and represent what’s really important in my life,” she wrote.
None of Lee’s students left Marshall post-fire, although Brenna did commute from North Hollywood for a few weeks. Most are back home or settled in longer-term housing.
For student Paolo Calchi Novati, the paper’s art editor, not being directly impacted by the fire meant he could pivot to taking a more dispassionate view covering the disaster’s aftermath.
He investigated why Southern California Edison got early blame for the fire, which destroyed more than 9,000 structures and caused damaged estimated at $7 to $10 billion. It took a month to put out.
Sports editor Bryan Noyola, 18, of Pasadena, found himself writing about Altadena history for the paper and researching everything from how many small businesses were affected, from the Bunny Museum to Altadena Hardware, to recording the loss of local joint Side Pie in Altadena, where he worked.
“I learned to tread quietly, to get them into the story,” he said about interviewing wildfire victims such as his co-worker and Marshall classmate Benjamin Muro.
Errol Dassie, 15, of Pasadena, who said his main sources for information are CNN and Fox News, the better to get opposing views and diverse coverage. He also gets the “New York Times” Sunday edition in print.
The students said they are given a wide berth in doing their jobs, something that Lee confirms. The only time principal Lori Touloumian grew concerned was when students received backlash from parents after they ran an editorial on the Israel and Palestinian conflict. The young journalists themselves shrugged the criticism away.
The “Eagle Eye” staff are now discussing their next edition, covering more wildfire-related stories, and offering opinions on the possible dismantling of the Department of Education, student walkouts protesting immigration, and layoffs among staff in the school district.
“Journalism teaches a lot of skills, in terms of being curious and being able to record data factually, to listening and critical thinking,” Lee said. “It can also be a springboard to other careers.”
Lee, himself a reporter for this newspaper in a former life, has been teaching for 14 years, seven of them at Marshall. He said he is proud to be training Pasadena’s next cadre of journalists to explore their world and write and photograph it.
“This year, I’ve been helping more on the design side, but everything else is them, I maybe put in some paragraph breaks,” he said. “But all the writing is theirs.”