The Brief

When Marcia Workman left her first-grade classroom at Pasadena’s Don Benito Elementary School on Jan. 7, she anticipated she’d be back the next day.

That night, a wildfire raged out of Eaton Canyon and into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Families emailed to ask if Workman, who lives in Pasadena, was OK.

Then they inquired about the class pets.

Workman said she wasn’t worried about the gecko hibernating beneath an artificial log, or the hardy gold orange loach fish. She figured as long as the school was still standing, they’d be OK.

But … what of the fluffiest creature in Room 4?

Cupcake, the black-and-white Polish rabbit with “dramatic eye make-up,” was trapped. And the National Guard had closed off the route to school.

“I had half of my heart thinking, ‘OK, what, what is the scenario?’” Workman said.

She said she wondered how she would explain the bunny’s demise to students who’d lost so much in the fires. “You can't sleep; you can't think of anything else.”

And so a mission to save the bunny was launched. It soon grew into “Operation Paw Patrol,” a district-wide effort to locate, rescue and care for classroom pets at half-a-dozen schools as the Eaton Fire burned.

Marcia Workman has taught at Don Benito Elementary since 2002. “We have kids that can walk to school with their families,” Workman said. Most of the teachers, like her, have been there for decades.

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Teaching ‘empathy for animals’

Animals have been a feature of Workman’s classroom since she started teaching in 1973.

The very first class pet was Midnight, a rabbit donated by a family who was moving and could no longer care for her.

“I didn't have pets as a child, so I thought, ‘Well, something I can put into the class to help the children have empathy for animals, take care of them, was … some nice, wonderful bunnies,” Workman said.

When she had students who were allergic to furry animals, she brought in snakes, lizards and a tarantula. All were adopted or rescued.

Cupcake (née Oreo, née Fluff — the students vote on the animals’ names at the start of each school year) is one of at least six bunnies that have hopped through her classroom over the years.

“I think [the vote on] ‘Cupcake’ this year was a little closer to lunchtime, so they were hungry,” Workman said.

The whiskery, red-eyed loaches, which are indistinguishable from one another, are 1, 2 and 3. The gecko is Gecky.

The students take turns feeding and caring for the animals. Workman welcomes any student who walks by to come say hi.

Workman said the kids compare her freckles to those on “Gecky” the gecko. “She's wonderful to come out during math time as we talk about repeating patterns,” Workman said.

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The student animal feeders for the week of Feb. 3 are posted on a wall in Marcia Workman’s first-grade class at Don Benito Elementary.

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“Maybe that animal in the classroom sparks something that's going to be a whole career for that child,” Workman said. “You just never know what's going to turn them on. So it's up to me to bring that into the classroom.”

Aidan, 6, was one of the week’s two “animal feeders” when I visited.

Her favorite creature is Cupcake, but she also enjoys how the fish tickle her fingers, and she likes the spotted gecko.

“The only thing I don't like about him is that he eats worms,” Aidan said. “I had to feed him once, and it was disgusting, because I had to touch the worms.”

‘Operation Paw Patrol’

When the Eaton Fire broke out, Workman fled her Pasadena home along with her son, her daughter, their spouses, two dogs and a cat. She grabbed several boxes of Nilla Wafer Cookies. She forgot her late husband’s ashes.

The fire "just set us into panic mode,” Workman said.

She also grabbed the class hamster, who had joined her household over an extended winter break.

By the time she tried to return to the school to retrieve Cupcake, the National Guard had blockaded the roads.

John Maynard became the principal at Don Benito Elementary School in 2023 and has worked in Pasadena Unified since 1998. He said the Eaton Fire is hard to compare with any experience in his career.

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She reached out to Principal John Maynard to ask for help. Fellow first-grade teacher Amethyst Juknavorian had also emailed Maynard, anxious about the other animals’ conditions.

“It's so easy for people to feel so helpless when so much destruction is going on around them. And, you know, you're thinking, what can I do?” Juknavorian said. “I couldn't have this bunny sitting in that classroom.”

Maynard shared the message Friday, Jan. 10, in a virtual meeting with other Pasadena principals.

“All of a sudden, the chat started getting filled with ‘This school has reptiles in it here’ ... and then ‘there's fish here,’” Maynard said.

So began “Operation Paw Patrol.”

Administrators compiled a list of animals that included a bearded dragon, beta fish, rats and snakes at six campuses.

They just needed an inside man.

Tracking down the animals

Facilities Program Manager Michael Dunning started as a carpenter nine years ago and now oversees contracts and construction in the district’s 24 schools.

“ I know every nook and cranny of this district for the most part,” Dunning said. “I've been in the basements, to the attics, to the roofs.”

Dunning helped coordinate the more than 1,500 contracted workers who joined existing maintenance staff to clean schools and remove more than 159 tons of debris.

“ I haven't stopped since that first morning of the fires,” Dunning said. “Seven days a week, just trying to get the kids back, get everybody safe ... get as much back to normal as much as possible. But I'm one of lots of people that are doing the same thing.”

And as a member of maintenance and operations, he could pass through the National Guard checkpoints.

Marcia Workman adopted Cupcake from the Pasadena Humane Society. "I think that some animals, when you rescue them, they give you even more love," she said.

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Workman said she picked up this rabbit pin while shopping for new shovels for the first-graders' garden.

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Dunning worked with school staff to assess whether each class pet needed to be relocated or whether a wellness-check and some food would suffice.

He escorted the principal of Sierra Madre Elementary as she retrieved a gecko. He brought the bearded dragon at San Rafael Elementary some Dubia roaches to snack on courtesy of his own family's bearded dragon, Fiji. A contracted cleaner had already started to feed the fish at Marshall High School.

“ I love all these schools,” Dunning said. “Just knowing that the schools are in danger for me was difficult to deal with.”

Maynard hitched a ride from Dunning in a maintenance and operations pick-up truck on the morning of Jan. 11 to retrieve Cupcake.

Despite having prior clearance, they still had to tell the National Guard “we were coming up to rescue a rabbit,” Maynard said.

The principal wasn’t sure what he’d find at Don Benito, which sits at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. There were rumors the school had burned down. Ash and debris covered the hill that borders the school’s north side, but the buildings were still standing. Several homes across the street to the east were leveled. The mountains were charred brown in the distance.

“Looking at the damage around the school and what had occurred.” Maynard said. “I don't have words for it. It's just shock, just not really even sure how to process that.”

The classrooms were coated in ash … but Cupcake was unscathed.

Maynard texted Workman’s son: “Bunny lives.” And he arranged to meet at the district office near downtown Pasadena.

Workman wanted Cupcake back in her classroom when school resumed.

“That would kind of give a sense of relief to some of the students who had lost everything,” Workman said. “They needed to see the classroom as they remembered Tuesday afternoon leaving it, and that certainly included the animals.”

Maynard welcomes students back to school on Jan. 29, 2025 along with Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco, right.

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Lessons from Cupcake

Don Benito reopened Jan. 29, more than three weeks after the Eaton Fire burned more than 14,000 acres and destroyed 9,400 buildings, including Eliot Arts Magnet Academy and several charter schools in the district.

Principal Maynard stood at the school’s front gate holding a sign that said “Welcome Back, Bobcats!” and offering hugs and high-fives.

“For today and the next couple days, I really just hope we actually have space for healing and the ability to express what we're feeling,” Maynard said that day.

A student works on a feelings sheet in Workman's class this week.

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In Workman’s class, students selected which of 20 colorful faces on a worksheet represented their feelings.

Ella, 6, drew an arrow to the yellow frowning sad face.

“My house didn't make it through the fire — it's gone,” she said.

District-wide, at least 862 student families lost homes, and 90 students have unenrolled since the start of the fires. It’s unclear how the fallout will reshape a district that, like other Los Angeles-area districts, has shrunk in recent years.

Workman is focused on helping students make up for three weeks away from the classroom.

“It's so important for us to get back on track, because everything is based on what we accomplished in first grade,” Workman said. “Every grade is on our shoulders.”

On Wednesday, a parent volunteer practiced reading with individual students while Workman rearranged magnetic letters on a white board and sounded out the words aloud with the rest of the class.

After discussing the A sound in "always," Workman asked the students to take out their feelings sheets again.

Ella hasn’t selected the sad face since the first day back.

“I was very excited to learn,” Ella said. “And happy that my school didn't get burned down.”

This week she's one of the animal feeders, which means she gets to top the bunny’s bowl of pellets with hay and vegetable scraps from the soup Workman made the night before.

Cupcake was called Oreo and Fluff by previous first-grade classes. "We have kids that'll knock on the door if they're in other grades. They come and visit her," Workman said.

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“We feed [Cupcake] hay," Aidan, a first-grader, said. "Sometimes we feed her carrots. Sometimes we feed her celery. Sometimes we feed her apples. She's living her best life right now."

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“I think her ears are cute,” Ella said. “Her whole body is cute, and the design on her back is cute too.”

The way Cupcake hops and zooms around her cage? “So cute.”

I asked Ella if she’d learned anything from the animals. She looked at the rabbit as she lay still, except for the wiggling of her nose.

“She's very calm,” Ella said. “And she teaches me how to be calm sometimes.”

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is blaming Boeing and his own agency for botching a test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, designed to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

A 311-page report details the issues that led to the failure of Starliner's first crewed test flight, which in June 2024 launched NASA astronauts Butch Willmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida.

The duo's launch was initially a success — but as their Starliner spacecraft approached the station, multiple thrusters failed, hampering the crew's ability to steer toward the station and dock.

After months of deliberation, NASA and Boeing made the decision to send Starliner back to Earth without Wilmore and Williams on board. Instead, the astronauts remained on the space station and returned home 9 months later — in SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule.

In a news conference Thursday, Isaacman said the report classified the failure as a Type A Mishap — the highest classification for a mission failure. The Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents, along with the Apollo 1 fire, were also classified as a Type A Mishap. While those accidents resulted in the deaths of crewmembers, the Starliner mission was "ultimately successful in preserving crew safety," according to the report.

The report identifies the thrusters as a key technical issue leading to the failure, although an investigation is still ongoing and a root cause has not yet been found.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected," said Isaacman. "But the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight."

He said those organizational and leadership problems were seen at both Boeing and NASA, Isaacman's own agency.

The report identified an erosion of trust between the two organizations and leadership that was "overly risk-tolerant."

Isaacman said that the more than 30 launch attempts for this mission led to "cumulative schedule pressure and decision fatigue." When discussing whether to return Wilmore and WIlliams in Starliner, Isaacman said the "disagreements over crew return options deteriorated into unprofessional conduct while the crew remained on orbit."

Isaacman said there would be "leadership accountability," but didn't offer any details.

"These are very complex programs, and complex programs like this fail in complex ways," said Don Platt, department head of aerospace engineering, physics and space science at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. "Those organizational issues are oftentimes, maybe even more important than the technical problems that they're facing."

Such a public scolding of NASA and one of its contractors by its own leader is uncommon, says Platt, who worked on the construction of the space station.

"I think it's really setting the stage for sort of the new way that NASA plans to do business here in his administration," says Platt.

He says that could mean greater transparency and oversight over NASA's contractors

Despite NASA's plans to decommission the space station by the end of the decade, Isaacman says he is still committed to flying Starliner. That would leave NASA with two options, Boeing and SpaceX, to fly astronauts to the station — something SpaceX already does with regularity.

The report offered 61 formal recommendations ahead of the next crewed Starliner mission.

"We're grateful to NASA for its thorough investigation and the opportunity to contribute to it," Boeing said in an emailed statement. "We're working closely with NASA to ensure readiness for future Starliner missions and remain committed to NASA's vision for two commercial crew providers."

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The Long Beach Unified Board of Trustees on Wednesday authorized the school district to end the employment of close to 600 employees, a move the LBUSD says is necessary to stabilize its ballooning deficit.

Board members approved two separate resolutions, the first of which does not renew the contracts of 515 certificated employees, who are on temporary contracts that must be re-upped annually. Though it is common for the district to choose not to renew some temporary contracts, the non-renewal of hundreds of TK-12 teachers, early childhood education teachers and social workers represents a massive change for the next school year from the current workforce of 10,000 total employees. While schools across the district will feel the cuts, Poly and Jordan high schools may be especially hard hit; 14 and 12 teachers at each site are listed on the district’s document of non-renewals.

The second resolution authorized the district to formally lay off 54 classified district positions: non-teaching staff members ranging from office support staff to instructional and recreation aides to library media assistants to parent liaisons.

The board votes come after months of warnings from the district that costs and spending have outpaced the district’s funding, saddling LBUSD with a $70 million deficit. The district is now attempting to shrink that deficit through a fiscal stabilization plan that “has prioritized preserving core instructional, wellness, and student support services,” the district wrote in an agenda item related to the cuts.

Prior to the vote, Superintendent Jill Baker framed the proposed cuts with the historical context of significant enrollment declines, the expiration of funds following the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic that had allowed the district to develop a healthy reserve, uncertain federal and state dollars and low attendance numbers, for which the district is penalized — “a really grave situation, fiscally,” she said, one that many districts across California are grappling with.

Baker walked board members through the significant efforts the district has made to manage costs, saving more than $47 million, including through significant central office reductions. Despite these efforts, it’s still not enough, Baker said.

“The release of temporary certificated contracts is one way of reducing the number of employees without impacting permanent certificated employees,” the district wrote in the agenda item.

For those 515 certificated employees who will be notified that their contracts will end, it’s a way that “the district can get away with letting teachers go without calling it a layoff,” said Peder Larsen, vice president of the Teachers Association of Long Beach, which represents certificated employees in LBUSD.

Some of them could be rehired, especially if their positions are in high demand, like science, math and special education teachers, Larsen said. Yet, it throws hundreds into a tailspin of uncertainty and fear, unsure if their jobs have definitively ended and how long they will have health coverage, he added.

While he said the district has not officially announced that no permanent certificated employees will be cut (they have until March 15 to do so), he said he is “reading the tea leaves” and predicting those permanent positions will be safe this year.

In his comment to the board during public testimony, Larsen advocated for examining the money spent annually on consultants and contracts and urged the board and district to re-examine their priorities and “choose to protect the people who serve students every single day.”

On both votes, School Board Member Maria Isabel López was the lone vote against the resolutions, voicing her opinion that some of these positions could have been saved if fiscal priorities had been different and major contracts had not been approved.

Other board members acknowledged that the votes will change lives. “There’s not one of us in this room that takes this lightly,” said Board President Diana Craighead before voting in favor of the cuts. Board Member Doug Otto said he was voting to adopt the resolutions “sadly, reluctantly and necessarily.”