The Brief

Vernon is an almost exclusively industrial city just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. And one of the companies that operates within Vernon has recently become the target of lawsuits over its use of a chemical called ethylene oxide, a colorless, flammable gas used to sterilize medical supplies. It’s also a known carcinogen.

As the lawsuits make their way through court, local air regulators say they are working to protect residents and off-site workers from potentially harmful chemical emissions.

And not just in Vernon — air regulators are monitoring ethylene oxide levels at more than a dozen facilities in Greater L.A.

What is ethylene oxide and who monitors it?

Because it can be used on a wide range of materials, ethylene oxide is well-suited for sterilizing medical equipment. But public health officials say long-term exposure to it can increase one’s risk of developing certain cancers, as well as reproductive issues.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) is responsible for monitoring the air and enforcing regulations in L.A., Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties.

There are currently 15 facilities that use ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment under the agency’s jurisdiction, according to Susan Nakamura, SCAQMD’s chief operating officer. There is also one facility devoted to ethylene oxide aeration, which is the process of removing residual gas from items that have been sterilized.

SCAQMD began investigating facilities that use ethylene oxide in March 2022. At the time, the Environmental Protection Agency was revising its regulations on the chemical’s potential toxicity after a ProPublica analysis found that ethylene oxide was the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide.

Ethylene oxide’s use in Vernon

Community members and workers in Southeast L.A. County have filed separate lawsuits against Sterigenics U.S. LLC, a company that sterilizes medical equipment in Vernon.

Each lawsuit alleges the company knowingly exposed people to unsafe levels of ethylene oxide without warning them of the potential health risks.

Sterigenics has denied any wrongdoing. In an email, spokesperson Kristin Gibbs told LAist that the company “empathizes with anyone battling cancer,” but that it’s “confident that it is not responsible for causing the illnesses.”

“We will vigorously defend our essential and safe operations against these claims,” she added.

What do air regulators do to protect residents?

The agency investigates issues at regional facilities and posts those results as well.

For example: In May 2022, SCAQMD issued a Notice of Violation to the Sterigenics building on 50th Street. According to the agency, the building operators:

• failed to operate its air pollution control system in accordance with its permit and in good condition; and
• failed to include a differential pressure gauge and a pH meter in its control equipment. That violation has since been resolved. 

A few months later, SCAQMD issued additional Notices of Violation to the company for installing control equipment at both of its buildings without permits. Those violations have also been resolved.

Throughout that time, multiple public officials asked the agency to shut down Vernon Sterigenics until it no longer posed a public health risk, including state Assemblymember Miguel Santiago and L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn. The latter wrote:

Maywood residents spend time outdoors during a hot afternoon.

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Residential buildings in Maywood are in close proximity to industrial facilities in neighboring Vernon.

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The agency can also apply labels to companies that correspond to a level of risk.

In June 2022, for example, SCAQMD designated Vernon Sterigenics as a “Potentially High-Risk Facility.” That designation is used when emissions data show it has the potential to exceed a cancer risk threshold greater than 100 chances in a million, or that it already has. Sterigenics was then required to provide an emissions reduction plan and ordered to make a number of upgrades. Some are still in the process of being fulfilled.

To mitigate the potential impact of the Vernon facility’s emissions, “we used every tool in the tool box,” said Nakamura, SCAQMD’s chief operating officer. “We take the protection of public health very seriously.”

Tell us your experience

Are air regulators confident in their ethylene oxide monitoring results? 

As Hahn noted in her letter to SCAQMD, Southeast L.A. County’s proximity to Vernon has made it especially vulnerable to environmental issues. This includes contamination from Exide, a now-shuttered battery recycler that spewed lead and arsenic into Bell, Boyle Heights, Commerce, East L.A. Huntington Park, and Maywood for decades. Local residents also live close to freeways and other industrial facilities.

To make sure SCAQMD’s ethylene oxide monitoring results are precise, the agency employs a two-step process. Jason Low, deputy executive officer of the agency’s monitoring and analysis division, told LAist that the process requires air quality regulators to take a few seconds of air samples near the facility, then more samples as they move away. Those samples are sent to the agency’s lab for analysis.

SCAQMD also has a mobile platform, which “can detect signals related to ethylene oxide in real time,” Low added.

“So we can drive around the facility, and then we can drive away from the facility and see how the levels of ethylene oxide change,” he said.

Once the agency determines that there are elevated ethylene oxide emissions near a sterilization facility, it puts up canisters near and around it, including in local residential areas. These canisters take samples over a 24-hour period. Then, those canisters are also taken to the lab.

“We're one of the few laboratories in the nation that can do this,” Low said.

Nearby residents are unlikely to see the warning signs on the Sterigenics buildings in Vernon.

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What else is being done to protect local residents?

On the outer walls of Sterigenics in Vernon, there are signs that read: “This facility contains one or more chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm.”

These signs are required by state law. Similar ones can be found throughout California, including in parking lots and in the coffee section of grocery stores. The signs are meant to help Californians make informed decisions about their exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. But their utility is unclear, particularly when it comes to those who live around Sterigenics.

Vernon is almost entirely industrial, with only a few hundred residents. People who live in surrounding neighborhoods don’t necessarily enter the city, unless they work there. As a result, they may be unlikely to see those warning signs.

Earlier this summer, LAist knocked on the door of 60 homes in Maywood, just a few blocks from Sterigenics in Vernon. About a dozen residents answered the door. None of them had ever heard of ethylene oxide.

A year ago, Tanya Reyes watched in disbelief as the Eaton fire incinerated her Altadena home. As her three daughters listed everything they had lost in the days that followed, Reyes kept reminding them that what mattered most was that they still had each other.

A year later, Reyes is struggling. The steadiness she once summoned for her children has been worn down by chronic back pain, brought on by the strain of moving every few months, and the emotional toll of rebuilding her family’s life while working her teaching job, supporting pregnant and parenting teens.

Reyes is a teacher at McAlister High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and is among thousands of Los Angeles-area residents who watched their way of life destroyed as fires tore through neighborhoods and schools. Today, life is about finding equilibrium in a new normal, with many still putting the pieces of their old lives back together.

“I’m very much a go-getter and a doer,” she said. “And my body is saying, ‘No, you can’t.”

The 2025 fires cut a wide swath of destruction that the region is still grappling with. Thirty-one people died. Over 100,000 people were displaced.

School communities were hit particularly hard. More than 16,000 structures were destroyed, including eight school campuses in the Pasadena Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified.

Evacuations put both districts on hold, temporarily halting instruction for roughly 12% of the state’s public schools.

In the year since the fires, both districts have been on the road to recovery, making progress on plans to rebuild and renew their communities. They have also provided support to students during the year of upheaval.

“Over the past year, the school communities devastated by the January 2025 wildfires have demonstrated extraordinary resilience and strength,” Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo told EdSource. “While the Eaton and Palisades fires tragically claimed lives, destroyed homes, and disrupted the sense of security and daily routine that students depend on, we have come together to rebuild, support each other and heal.”

Reconstruction

Throughout the region, school sites are reminders of the fires’ destructive path. Tons of fire debris have been removed, and rebuilding efforts have started taking shape. In many respects, the two school districts have rebounded, but in different ways.

Los Angeles Unified has made headway in rebuilding Marquez Charter Elementary, Palisades Charter Elementary and Palisades Charter High School.

Marquez Charter Elementary unveiled a new, temporary campus in September.

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Rebuilding the schools in LAUSD is estimated to cost up to $600 million. But the school district is able to count on rebuilding funds from a 2024 $9 billion construction bond passed by voters.

At Marquez Charter Elementary, enrollment is down to 130 students from 310 before the fires — some are attending other schools in the area or have left the region entirely. But in late September, those who remained were able to go back to their original campus in portable classrooms. Their permanent campus is expected to be built by 2028, for $207 million.

Just over a mile away, nearly 3,000 Palisades Charter High School students will return to campus this month in portable classrooms after spending the past year attending classes in a renovated Sears building. Their new campus is expected to cost $267 million to rebuild and is slated to open by the end of 2029.

It’s a different story 35 miles away in the school communities of Pasadena Unified, where long-standing financial challenges compound fire recovery. District officials also look to a $900 million bond measure passed in 2024 to help restore its five campuses lost to the fire. But money is still tight. The district has struggled financially for years and has been repeatedly instructed to curtail spending to avoid a county takeover.

As the district recovers from the fire, its financial struggles have made recovery difficult. In November, the district cut $24.5 million from next year’s budget as part of a larger $30.5 million reduction. Roughly $17.2 million of those cuts were in staffing, from teachers to gardeners and librarians — some of whom had been directly impacted by the fires. About 40 teachers were ultimately laid off.

Compounded losses

While both districts were able to relocate campuses — and keep students together in the same classes with the same teacher — within weeks of the fires, some students — particularly foster and homeless youth — struggled.

In the Altadena area, about 225 children and youth in foster care were living in the region impacted by the Eaton fire, the majority of them school age. Some live in congregate care settings, such as group homes, while others stay with relatives.

Within three months of the fire, 36 students had relocated outside the area, moving an average of 16 miles away, according to an analysis by the UCLA Pritzker Center, a research center focusing on youth in the child welfare system.

As recovery continues, Taylor Dudley, the center’s executive director, noted that while some school-based services, such as support for students with disabilities, were initially delayed as schools took account of the losses, they were eventually provided more consistently as schools stabilized. But, she is concerned that students may begin to see other services “drop off” with time.

For example, if a student’s home is now safe to return to, the child might be reenrolled at the school they attended before the fire. Dudley noted that a transition of this nature raises many questions for a foster student, who may not have a constant advocate by their side: Who will ensure all their credits will transfer from their previous school? Will their transportation plan be upheld? Will their individualized education plan (IEP) transfer in full, with all services continuing?

Meanwhile, the healing process has continued for students in the area who were homeless before the fires or who lost their homes. Nearly 300 homeless students in Pasadena Unified were enrolled by the first Wednesday in October, known as Census Day, during the 2024-25 school year, according to an EdSource analysis of the state’s most recently available data. About 10,800 were enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The state initially made it easier for families to enroll their children in new schools by removing the typically required documentation. Jennifer Kottke, the homeless liaison for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, spent months after the fires consulting with schools, working around processes to verify residency and determine which district a student belonged to. Students experiencing homelessness have the right to immediate enrollment at any moment at any school, she said.

Some families who were suddenly homeless after the fires “were having a hard time because they’ve never seen themselves as being the ones in need,” Kottke said. “They’re the ones who provided for those who were in need.”

These families had previously been “the givers,” as Kottke noted. Some initially declined resources, from basic hygiene products to computers to food, because they believed other families might need them more, she said.

Meanwhile, as the year unfolded, some students in fire zones faced another crisis: immigration raids in the late spring. Both situations, one immediately after the other, targeted students’ sense of safety, said Lisa Fortuna, who chairs the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the University of California, Riverside.

“There’s so much threat to self and to one’s close loved ones, the people you’re dependent on, the places and things you depend on as your home, as your resources in the community,” said Fortuna. “It’s a cumulative loss.”

Adjusting to the new normal

Despite a quick surge in counseling and psychological support for students, the emotional fallout from the fires is ongoing. The occasional fire drill or nearby house fire can reignite feelings of fear and loss for students, said Gabriela Gualano, a teacher librarian at LAUSD’s Paul Revere Charter Middle School.

“We had to definitely front-load to the kids: ‘Hey, this is what’s happening. It’s just a drill. We know you’ve done this before. The district just wants to make sure that we’re able to do this in a timely manner, so we’re going to get through it,’” Gualano said. Some students have developed a dark humor around the fires, she said, while others avoid the topic altogether.

How schools in the region will mark the Jan. 7 anniversary of the fires varies.

At Pasadena Unified schools, a moment of silence will usher in the anniversary.

Some schools in the L.A. Unified area do not have elaborate plans to commemorate Jan. 7.

Some Los Angeles campuses might opt to plant a tree or take students on a walk, but only activities that heal, said Julianne Reynoso, Pasadena Unified’s assistant superintendent of Student Wellness and Support Services.

Meanwhile, Wendy Connor, a retired first grade teacher at Marquez Charter Elementary, said the school doesn’t plan to do anything on the anniversary. Maintaining a sense of normalcy is still the priority, she said.

“It’s been a collaborative, iterative process,” said LAUSD school board member Nick Melvoin, who represents schools in the Palisades. “I think we’ve done a lot of right by our students, which is most important, but always, always more to do.”

The district is making “sure we keep our eye on the ball when it comes to the permanent rebuild,” he said.

Meanwhile, teachers say they’ve had to grapple with decades of losses that can’t be replaced. Connor tries to remember what her room looked like, the place where she taught for 38 years when she and her students fled: “Somebody’s backpack is open on their desk; all the chairs are out or pushed around instead of just sitting all straight normal. It’s all wacky.”

The grieving continues for teachers, she said. “It’s not things that you can turn to the district and say, ‘Will you buy me this?’” she said. “You (used to) have samples of every art project all put together in a binder up on the shelf — and now you don’t have any of it.”

For teacher Tanya Reyes and her family, the past year’s struggles have made her reflect on how the community can best move forward after the devastation. Reyes stressed the importance of remembering “who the roots of Altadena were.”

She, her husband, and three children have moved three times — from one family or friend’s home to the next, and finally into a new rental home roughly six miles from Altadena in Sierra Madre.

Reyes’ family is slowly coming to terms with what they lost this past year when their home burned, including a daughter’s stuffed tigress. Over the past year, the family’s pet bearded dragon died. But life moves on, and their new space is morphing into a semblance of home.

As the year progressed, Reyes learned that the recovery process means taking it slower.

“I feel humbled as someone who is a doer and a mover and a goer to really have to sit back and be still,” Reyes said. “There is a mourning or a grief in my body that I don’t even have awareness of, but it’s showing up.”

The Eaton Fire didn't just take the Abdus-Shakoor family's home, business and two rental properties. It also destroyed the mosque they co-founded, Masjid Al Taqwa, the first mosque in the Altadena-Pasadena area.

And in the year since the deadly and destructive fire, the family has rallied to provide a place of worship and belonging for other community members who are also trying to make sense of the loss and devastation.

“ It's just been a devastating year, never-ending process of recovery, and a rollercoaster of emotional ups and downs,” said Jihad Abdus-Shakoor, whose parents were among the mosque’s early founders.

Around 30 households from the Masjid Al Taqwa community were affected by the fire: Most lost homes; one woman’s daughter was killed.

Since July, the congregation has met weekly in a space rented from the Pasadena Covenant Church. But their goal is to rebuild the mosque on its original grounds.

The need to bring the community together

Days after the fire, they brought the community together for Jummah prayers (congregational Friday prayers) at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pasadena. A few weeks later, when Ramadan began, the Abdus-Shakoor family decided to find a place of worship.

What remained of Masjid Al Taqwa, the first mosque in the Altadena-Pasadena area, after the Eaton Fire.

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Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said he wanted a break to focus on personal losses, but his father, one of the mosque’s early founders, insisted that the community needed a space for Ramadan.

 "I believe he was correct in saying this: ‘Hey look, we have got to do this for the community,’” he said. “I think he needed it also. It was good for my mother as well.”

The family found a space at New Horizon School in Pasadena to provide congregants with daily iftars and even an Eid celebration, continuing their tradition of providing gifts to the children.

" We just had to kick into gear and try to carry on in a normal way, hopefully to bring the community back and have for them ... a place to still come as a community of Masjid Al Taqwa,” said Delores Abdus-Shakoor, Jihad Abdus-Shakoor’s mother.

But, there were moments, she said, when it felt like too much.

 ”Then all of a sudden, one day I looked up and I said, ‘No, it's not too much,’” she said. “It made me think about where the Qur’an talks about how Allah will not put a burden on you greater than you have strength to bear.”

The Abdus-Shakur family: Jihad Abdus-Shakoor; his wife, Desha Dauchan; mother Delores Abdus-Shakur; and father Aaron Abdus-Shakur.

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Having the space at New Horizons School during Ramadan offered some reprieve. The community had a space to break their fast and offer communal prayers, and she could focus on dealing with the mountains of paperwork from insurance companies, the L.A. County assessor and others.

After Ramadan, they rented temporary places for Friday congregational prayers.

The need for a permanent place was apparent.

People needed a place to pray, said Kameelah Wilkerson, who is on the mosque's board of directors.

"If you look around, you see people just hanging out and talking to each other," she said. "And see my son behind me sitting and talking to the katib [imam], and that is what this space is about."

Interfaith relations after the fire 

Jihad Abdus-Shakoor and another community member took on the work of finding a “temporary, permanent place.”

This is where interfaith relations nurtured after the fires kicked in.

The representatives of Masjid Al Taqwa asked Pasadena Covenant Church, which had previously offered them a space for Ramadan.

The church was very accommodating.

“ We had two rooms,” Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said. “We opened up the wall in between and made it a connected space, bigger, and just put in new carpet.”

The church also allowed Masjid Al Taqwa to repaint the building and remove furniture so it could look and operate like a mosque. It's a spacious room, with thick, blue and gold carpeting, the kind your feet sink into.

Flyers for a Christmas friendship dinner between the Pasadena Covenant Church and Masjid Al Taqwa.

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Aaron Abdus-Shakoor, Jihad Abdus-Shakoor's father, said the response after the fire showed "one humanity."

 "It went across religions, different religions. Everyone was trying to help, and we found kindness in humanity," he said. "And it was our oneness, our kind likeness that people emphasized, not our differences."

The church, he said, welcomes the community for regular dinners for fellowship. After the final Jummah prayers of 2025, Aaron Abdus-Shakoor made an announcement to the congregation: The Pasadena Covenant Church had invited them for a belated Christmas celebration in the new year, and they had even made accommodations for halal food.

The rebuilding process  

In January 2025, I visited Masjid Al Taqwa soon after the fire. All that remained then was soot, ash and the charred skeletons of chairs in a line pointing toward Mecca.

“It was very painful to go and look at the site and see it all burn down and try to wrap our minds around that,” Delores Abdus-Shakoor said about the first time she saw the ruins.

Since then, the lot has been cleared, Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said, and mosque leaders are in talks with architects to imagine the mosque’s new iteration.

" We’re in flux on whether we're going to just be rebuilding on the one lot or we're going to be able to have the opportunity to acquire the adjacent lot to expand the mosque,” Jihad Abdus-Shakoor said.

There are also ongoing talks about whether to add other components, such as transitional housing. But, Delores Abdus-Shakoor said, before any plan can be finalized, they will gather community input.

Kameelah Williams, Kameelah Wilkerson, Kamal Wilkerson and Jihad Abdus-Shakur grew up attending Masjid Al-Taqwa.

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Soon after the fires, the greater Muslim community rallied around Masjid Al Taqwa, helping raise just under $1 million to support affected congregants and the mosque.

And Jihad Abdus-Shakoor is confident he can rely on the community again when it comes to rebuilding.

 "We're going to need more support. We're going to have to do more fundraising,” he said.

And that, he said, is true for all of Altadena.

"It's going to take a lot longer to rebuild, and it's going to take more resources, more money to bring the city back,” he said. “Hopefully, people will not forget about us and look closer into what are the actual needs in the community.”

Kameelah Williams, a longtime Masjid Al Taqwa attendee, said she can't wait to see the mosque rebuilt so the community can be continued.

" I also hope to see a space that is welcoming to all in terms of maybe creating some type of business within the masjid, maybe a coffee shop," she said. " Maybe we have a community kitchen, maybe we can do a Meals on Wheels. In my profession, I'm a funeral director, so maybe a Muslim mortuary."

Najla Henderson and her son Zavian stands next to her parents Daarina and Rashad Abdus-Samad.

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Loss of a space she grew up in

While some in the community are staying put and hoping to rebuild, others like Najla Abdus-Samad, who was born and raised in Altadena and grew up attending Masjid Al Taqwa, have had to leave Altadena.

Her new home in Los Angeles is “beautiful,” she said, but there’s nothing like Altadena. And though she has found a new place of worship and community at Islah LA in South Los Angeles, she misses Masjid Al Taqwa.

“I  was born into Masjid Al Taqwa. The women there, the people there, I've known since I was a baby,” Abdus-Samad said. “There's absolutely nothing that can replace that.”

She went from living 5 minutes from Masjid Al Taqwa to about an hour’s drive away in L.A. traffic. But she still makes the trek when she can “for my self preservation.”

It’s been a beloved Los Angeles tradition for well over a decade. On New Year’s Eve, a crowd of people gather around on Santa Monica Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in West L.A. to celebrate at midnight.

The crowd isn’t waiting for a ball to drop, or for a bell to toll — not in L.A. Instead, the crowd is waiting for the exact moment that an anti-smoking billboard resets. Its message warns of the dangers of lighting up by showing the number of people who’ve died that year due to smoking.

For one beautiful moment, the billboard shows that not a single American has died from lung cancer or other smoking-related illnesses in the new year. (Of course, there’s no way to know this for sure — the counter is based on previous estimates and statistical averages.)

The billboard has grown from a neighborhood gathering, as the L.A. Times reported in 2012, to a packed viral celebration in the 2020s. Some Reddit users even loosely planned this year’s meetup, and it’s now cemented as a mainstay of how this beautiful, occasionally smoky city rings in the new year.

What’s the origin story?

The billboard dates back to 1987. William E. Bloomfield Sr., an ex-smoker, anti-smoking advocate and Redondo Beach resident, put it up to make the effects of smoking feel more real, according to the L.A. Times.

“I want to do what I can to get even a few people to quit, or at least think about it,” Bloomfield told the Times back then.

Drumroll: What do the sponsors have to say? 

LAist reached out to the billboard’s sponsors to get their take, and long story short: They’re fans of the tradition.

“Seeing the social media response of Angelenos counting down the New Year alongside this billboard is a powerful example of how impactful public awareness can be,” said Jen Maduko, the American Cancer Society’s senior executive director in Los Angeles, in a statement provided to LAist. “Lung cancer continues to claim more lives than any other cancer, and smoking remains the leading preventable cause.”

The ACS also said that they hope that the billboard’s viral status will encourage smokers to quit, or at least make current and former smokers consider getting screened for lung cancer. You can find more info on that from the ACS here.

“Although we appreciate how it brings renewed attention to the effects of smoking, we hope that it encourages action throughout the year,” Maduko added.

So there you have it. The sponsors behind the smoking deaths billboard have given Angelenos the blessing to ring in the new year on the side of the road in West L.A.

Who knows, one day this billboard might become even more iconic than the more traditional celebrations at places like Grand Park in downtown L.A. and the Queen Mary in Long Beach — or even make it to a national telecast.

On the first day of Los Angeles Unified’s Winter Academy, enrollment is 14% lower than last year with about 64,000 students signed up for a week of credit recovery and enrichment camps.

The district moved the program to start in January this year, ahead of the second semester, rather than keep it in December at the end of the first semester, as in previous years. And it is now a full week instead of three days.

“ I believe that even though the enrollment is a bit lower, attendance hopefully will be higher,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on Monday.

The program started in 2022 as "acceleration days,” meant to help students make up for lost learning time during the COVID-19 pandemic using winter and spring breaks.

Enrollment has ranged from 71,000 to 74,000 students, with an average attendance of 55% to 60%, according to a statement provided to LAist by a district spokesperson.

Variations on winter recovery

Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies is one of 319 campuses offering Winter Academy. About 200 students attended the school’s enrichment camps, which in addition to STEAM programs (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics), included focuses on writing and math.

Middle schoolers at SOCES on Monday crowded around lab tables to watch folded paper flowers bloom when placed in a pan of water, a display of “capillary action”— the movement of sticky water molecules through a porous material.

Norman Goss keeps a foil ball aloft with the power of static electricity as classmate Catherine Galvez, left, watches, on the first day of SOCES' Middle School STEAM Camp during Winter Academy.

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Seventh grader Catherine Galvez said her dad signed her up for the camp because she wants to be an astronomer.

“We're trying to find STEM programs that are like, inviting, but also, like, easy to get into,” Galvez said.

Teacher Riley Leary said unlike the traditional Winter Academy, the Middle School STEAM Camp is not focused on replacing work from the school year.

“This is based on curiosity. This is based on wonder,” Leary said.

Across campus, seventh grader Sophia Bezgubenko's wonder is limited to whether she can bring up her grades in health and science. She's one of the 300 students who are signed up for credit recovery. Bezgubenko is here at her mom’s urging.

“ I'm a little annoyed, but it’s alright,” she said of having to get up early during the last week of winter break.

The Algebra II students in Raymond Toleco's Winter Academy classroom review linear functions and absolute value functions.

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A few doors down, 31 of 35 students enrolled showed up for Raymond Toleco’s Algebra II class.

Toleco said the additional days of Winter Academy give him more time to review with students instead of just assigning them work to complete on their own over the break.

“Mostly I have hardworking students and some of them wanna improve from D to hopefully a B,” Toleco said.