The Brief

Palisades Charter High School reopens Tuesday a little more than a year after fire tore through campus and the surrounding community.

The Palisades Fire destroyed 30% of the campus including classrooms and the track and field. Now there is a wide grassy expanse where an academic building once stood. Bulldozers cleared the baseball diamond to make way for three dozen portable classrooms. Many of the campus’ trees are still standing with blackened trunks.

A few of the 2,400 students expected to return in-person toured the campus Monday, including junior Jackson Richmond. He said despite the changes, the campus still feels familiar.

“Nothing just beats, like, the look of Pali,” Richmond said. “Like, it's in movies for a reason.”

But other Palisades families are more cautious about returning. Some parents have raised concerns about whether the remediation efforts went far enough and how the test results were communicated to families.

“ I have mixed feelings,” said Victoria Kotlyar, parent of two sophomores. “I'm happy that they're gonna have a school to go to, but I am concerned about just the environment and if there's any pollution.”

The process to reopen the school included debris removal, cleaning, and multiple rounds of soil, water, air and surface testing in the new and remaining buildings.

LAUSD installed 36 new portable classrooms where the Palisades Charter High School baseball field once was.

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“At the moment, I'm 100% convinced that we are in a very safe environment,” said Principal Pamela Magee on Monday. “We've got folks watching out to make sure that that continues into the future.”

Environmental testing continues

Pali High was once part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school converted to an independently run charter school in 1993, but continues to lease its campus from the district.

LAUSD coordinated and paid for the post-fire clean-up.

LAUSD hired outside contractors to test, clean and retest the soil, water, air and surfaces in the remaining and new structures for toxins related to the wildfire.  

“We have full confidence that what was done was appropriate to safeguard not only our students, but our staff, students [and] the community,” said Office of Environmental Health and Safety Director Carlos Torres in a virtual community meeting on January 21.

The district did additional environmental testing in November and December 2025 to ensure the campus was not harmed by the demolition and construction in surrounding neighborhoods.

“We will be doing periodic sampling and analysis at this school and all the schools that were directly impacted by the fire,” said Deputy OEHS Director Jennifer Flores,

For example, the district has installed air sensors at the school that can detect two types of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide, which are associated with pollution.

What risks remain?

Toxins related to wildfires can linger indoors, including in porous surfaces like carpet, stuffed animals and acoustic ceiling tiles. They release into the air over time in a process called “off-gassing.”

UCLA environmental health sciences professor Yifang Zhu said one way to imagine off-gassing is through the lingering smell of cigarettes at a casino that no longer allows smoking.

A large green field lies where Pali's "J" building once stood. Junior Tiffany Jensen said she imagines eating lunch here in the future.

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Whether those toxins harm people depends on “a combination [of] the chemicals themselves and then the level of exposures and the duration of the exposures over time,” Zhu said.

LAUSD contractors used vacuums with special filters to clean Pali’s remaining ceiling tiles. The air was tested several times and the results showed no buildup of fire-related compounds, “therefore the removal of the ceiling tiles is not necessary, and the interior spaces are safe to occupy,” read the district's report.

The school district asked Zhu and fellow researchers studying the health effects of the fires to review the district’s remediation plan and environmental test results. (Zhu said she and her colleagues were not compensated for their evaluation.)

“There's always chemicals you can detect, but I think we should really think through the lens… what is the additional level of risk?” Zhu said.

Zhu, whose daughter is a recent graduate of Pali, concluded that if given the choice now, she would feel comfortable sending her back to the campus.

“There's no such thing as zero risk,” Zhu said. “Risk is very personal. Every family is… different.”

Students plan to revive Pali traditions

Students say they’re looking forward to reviving Pali traditions from pep rallies to the senior’s blind speed-dating event.

Homecoming returns to the campus gym Saturday. The students pushed the fall dance to the end of January to hold it on their home turf.

The theme is “A Night in Greece,” and junior Tiffany Jensen said she expects to see a lot of blue and white summer dresses.

“A year ago, no one knew what was gonna happen to Pali,” she said. “It feels so amazing to be back on the campus to see all of our teachers, our faculty, staff, everyone is really excited to come back.”

Juniors Tiffany Jensen and Jackson Richmond got a preview of the Palisades Charter High School Campus on Monday.

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A few key features of the campus remain closed. The “stadium by the sea,” pool and related buildings, are still under construction and anticipated to reopen by the end of this February, according to Director of Operations Rafael Negroe.

Constructing a new building to replace the destroyed classrooms will take longer. LAUSD has budgeted $266 million from the bond passed in 2024 to rebuild Pali’s campus by the end of 2028. The district will also seek reimbursement from its insurers and FEMA.

Will all the families who left come back?

It’s still unclear how many families who lost homes in the fires will return or opt to transfer to schools closer to where they now live. Many of the schools damaged by January’s fires have fewer students this year. Pali’s enrollment has dropped 14% compared to before the fire, from 2,900 to 2,500 students. About 100 students are enrolled in the school's virtual learning program.

Parent Victoria Kotlyar said her family sold the property where their Palisades home once stood for “dirt cheap.”

“ We cannot wait so many years to rebuild because our kids are growing and they have nowhere to go,” Kotlyar said.

But her high school aged children, including sophomore Max Paik-Schoenberg, are committed to Pali.

“Whatever we buy, we're trying to buy something in the area so our kids can continue their education journey at these schools,” Kotlyar said. “We love the schools.”

Tuesday is the first time Paik-Schoenberg will see the Palisades since the fires. He transferred to Santa Monica High School instead of switching to virtual learning, but re-enrolled ahead of the campus reopening.

“ I'm pretty excited,” he said, “but I'm not really sure if it's gonna be the same as it was.”

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, among other districts, has called on the state to help mitigate financial challenges for projects. And despite some help, they’re still anticipating deficits beginning in the 2027-28 academic year.

For its June general, unrestricted budget, LAUSD is projecting a deficit of $1.351 billion for the 2027-28 academic year, according to a presentation Tuesday at the board’s Committee of the Whole meeting. That’s taking the updated cost-of-living adjustment from the governor’s May revision into account. But with possible additional May revision revenue, that deficit could drop to $514 million.

For the 2028-29 academic year, LAUSD is projecting a deficit of $3.581 billion compared with $2.534 billion after accounting for additional revenue from the May revision.

“I want to kind of take us back to a couple of weeks ago when some of us were in Sacramento marshaling some advocacy to various elected officials, the governor’s office themselves,” said acting LAUSD Superintendent Andrés Chait on Tuesday. “I want to mark that I do think that some of the movement that we saw in the May revise can be attributed to the advocacy that folks that are sitting here and that we partnered with vis-a-vis labor really did move the needle, as it were.”

The district’s budget also takes into account agreements reached last month with three unions that will cost $1.2 billion annually.

“We’re not in a place necessarily where we’d like to be. I continue to be concerned about the almost $4 billion that is being withheld in terms of Prop 98,” Chait said. “Those are dollars that are for today’s kids, and therefore should be allocated today, so that they can go out and serve our schools as needed. So, there is still a significant amount of advocacy to come.”

To Spencer Pratt and his supporters, becoming mayor of Los Angeles first means winning the internet.

Pratt has amplified outlandish artificial intelligence videos, including one depicting lightsaber duels between him and the city's current mayor, Karen Bass, and another where he's portrayed as Batman descending on a burning Los Angeles to save the day; his campaign has tapped an army of freelance "clippers" to edit short social media snippets of him bashing the city's leaders; and he talks about nonexistent "super meth" plaguing the city's streets and pushed false narratives about California lawmakers' response to the Palisades Fire.

A screenshot of a artificial intelligence video created by a supporter of Spencer Pratt.

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It's perhaps no surprise that the 42-year-old former villain of the reality television show "The Hills" knows how to work the attention economy, but he's doing so by borrowing the combative and mocking style of politics popular in fringe online forums and celebrated by allies of President Trump.

"He's probably the most Trumpian candidate we've ever seen in terms of house style," said Steve Bannon, Trump's former top adviser. "Trump's superpower was bringing in people into politics who hate politics, and that's what he's doing online right now."

Pratt's internet antics are up against long odds.

On June 2, Angelenos will go to the polls for the city's "jungle primary," a nonpartisan contest where Pratt, a Republican, will face off against Democratic incumbent Bass and progressive council member Nithya Raman.

If any candidate surpasses 50% of the vote, that person becomes mayor. If nobody does, the top two vote getters compete in a November runoff. Polls show Pratt and Raman neck and neck, with Bass commanding a comfortable lead.

Yet Pratt is harnessing the web to shake things up.

He has leapt into the usually more mundane world of municipal politics with brash and extreme rhetoric, taking to TikTok, with direct-to-camera videos condemning Bass' response to the devastating Pacific Palisades wildfires that claimed his family's home. He describes Bass as "the mayor who let the town burn down."

Pratt has also blamed city leaders with enabling the deterioration of city residents' quality of life, or, as he puts it on TikTok, "a city battered by fires, homelessness and crime," a framing that would sound familiar to anyone watching right-wing influencers and streamers.

Pratt says, without evidence, that "socialists in LA city government are stealing your money." He denigrates the city's homeless as fentanyl-addled "zombies." And he has promised to clear out encampments by mass-arresting people living on the streets.

He's accused Bass and Raman of "running a grift with the Homeless Industrial Complex," a vague and unsubstantiated claim aimed at whipping up his fans online, according to Dan Cassino, a professor of government at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies masculinity and politics.

"These are the sorts of things that play very well in red-pilled forums where there's this idea that everyone is in control of their lives and 'we need to embrace hard truths out there that they won't teach you in school,'" he said.

Pratt's endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, Cassino said, is proof of Pratt's credibility in the manosphere, the bro-friendly world of male influencers who wage war against polite society.

"Focusing on this audience is a way to target young men," Cassino said. "Just as Trump did in 2024, and now we see Spencer Pratt doing the same thing."

Former LA councilmember: 'Winning the internet' doesn't equal an election win

Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin has been watching Pratt's campaign morph from unserious long-shot to top three contender.

Pratt had a megaphone of millions of social media followers before he ran for public office. That has helped supercharge the spread of the AI slop videos his fans have made. So has Elon Musk's repeated re-sharing and replies to Pratt's content on X, the platform the tech mogul owns, to his 240 million followers.

When Pratt wants his incendiary campaign messages and AI content to spread even farther, conservative influencers like Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro and Benny Johnson are at the ready, commenting and reposting to juice Pratt's reach.

"Winning the internet is not the same thing as winning the election, but it can help," said Bonin, who now directs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.

Spencer Pratt often turns to TikTok to promote his candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles.

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He points to how the kinetic digital campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani inundated Instagram Reels and TikTok with videos showing how natural and conversant he was with the format.

More close to home, Los Angeles Controller Kenneth Mejia won his 2022 election using his two corgis on billboards and in social media videos as a way of appealing to those terminally online.

The difference with Pratt, Bonin said, is that he's using the leverage of the well-oiled right-wing online media machine.

"Unlike left-leaning candidates, right-leaning candidates come into an internet ecosystem that is well-practiced in promoting itself through its various networks," he said.

Also giving a signal boost, Bonin said, was the launch of California Post, a West Coast edition of conservative New York Post owned by Rupert Murdoch, around the same time Pratt launched his campaign. The outlet has "been reinforcing the supposed dystopian crisis Los Angeles has been living through, and that is a big part of Pratt's narrative," Bonin said.

Pratt and his campaign did not return requests for an interview. Bass did not offer any comment.

Raman, through a spokesman, dismissed Pratt's online tactics, saying the AI slop videos show how out of touch he is with something that's an existential concern to the city's entertainment industry.

"Hollywood jobs are being devastated by AI, meanwhile Spencer Pratt is using his platform to promote AI-generated content amplifying the very technology replacing the workers he claims to care about," Raman said in a statement. "Our videos are made by working film and television professionals who believe Los Angeles can be better."

The MAGA tightrope walk

There are two ways to respond to this: Try to meet Pratt on his level, or don't participate at all.

Cassino, the government professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said Raman and Bass are taking "the Rose Garden strategy" by not trying to match the intensity and absurdity of Pratt's online campaign, which he said is probably politically wise.

"He's more chronically online than they are. He has fans who generate this stuff for him in a way that they don't, so any attempt for them to do this will make them look inauthentic," he said.

It is difficult to gauge how much of Pratt's content and rage-baiting is coming across the social media feeds of Los Angeles voters, but, at least on X, he's been praised as the candidate who is the most "anti-woke" and "based," internet slang for being unapologetically one's self and unafraid of offending others.

His favorite pejorative for Bass is "Karen Basura," which is Spanish for trash. And he calls the mayor's supporters "Bassholes" — cruel, bully-like language that Cassino said is catering to young men online.

"If people are voting for Spencer Pratt because they think it's funny versus because they seriously want him to be mayor, the vote still counts," Cassino said.

However it is resonating or not with voters, Pratt is not slowing his inflammatory language and pugnacious tone.

It's a posture being lapped up by the online MAGA sphere. It also represents the new template for right-wing political candidates, both national and local, Bannon added.

"Pratt knows it's not politics, it's drama," said Bannon, who was a Hollywood financier before he got into politics. "He's got a warrior mentality."

If Bannon found any criticism of Pratt's campaign, it would be Pratt's shameless promotion of AI slop.

A fierce critic of Silicon Valley, Bannon said the videos are entertaining, but they risk turning off voters who can see them as trivializing the race, not to mention how the internet is already glutted with AI junk and fakes.

"On the AI slop, he's one inch away from jumping the shark," Bannon said. "It can be effective, but it's starting to get tiresome, and it could backfire if you promote it too much."

Internet notoriety, though, cannot dislodge one fact about Los Angeles: Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one, presenting Pratt with a serious challenge if he advances to the November runoff.

Trump on Wednesday signaled support for Pratt. The mayoral hopeful did not immediately blast this out to his social media followers.

And that's because, while Pratt is a registered Republican, he has tried to separate himself from the MAGA movement and has repeatedly highlighted how the mayor's race in Los Angeles is nonpartisan.

It's a tightrope walk that Bannon, one of the chief architects of the MAGA movement, is keenly attuned to as he offers conditional praise for Pratt.

"Tell him I would endorse him," Bannon said. "But I don't want to hurt his chances of winning in LA."
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