A model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025. Developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the U.S., constructed using fire-resistant materials and methods.
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Adriana Heldiz
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Topline:
Dixon Trail is the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. Making that a reality for the millions of Californians who already live in harm’s way is a daunting and costly challenge that lawmakers are only just beginning to grapple with.
Why it matters: The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire. This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.
Why now: Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.
Read on... for more details about the neighborhood and challenges homeowners with older homes might have to deal with to make homes fire resistant.
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched, shrubby hills of Escondido, north San Diego County.
But look a little closer. The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin, wire mesh. Each window is double-paned, the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame. The privacy fences, a suburban staple, look like wood, but are actually brown-tinted steel. Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel.
National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills (a question of when, not if) this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision’s edge.
Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.
“Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them,” said Steve Ruffner, who oversees KB projects across the region.
The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire.
This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.
Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing. Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge — and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with.
Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests. An unknown number live in homes built before 2008, when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas. Some home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able. Others less so. A report from 2024 by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story, 2,000 square-foot single family home at anywhere from $2,000 to “more than $100,000.”
Karen Collins, vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, calls these retrofits “pre-disaster mitigation” measures. As wildfires grow more severe and costly, these measures can offer “a huge return on investment from what is otherwise spent at the loss,” she said. Translated from insurance speak: Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward.
“But yes, to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding, that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, so there's a public policy trade off,” she said. “Like, how do we do this?”
Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, touches a window with two panes of tempered glass on the side of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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Some local governments — albeit not many — offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades.
The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to some homeowners who make firewise changes, though the promised savings are often smaller than many homeowners expect or demand.
There aren’t any statewide plans to help harden California’s housing stock en masse, though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a few other ideas.
Beyond changes in policy, California homeowners, planners, real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire risk, said Yana Valachovic, a forest health and fire expert with the University of California. Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense, or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed, such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West.
“It needs to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house, because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your investment,” said Valachovic. “Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.”
A fireproof home?
Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm.
Open eaves (the cavities beneath a roof’s overhang); vents that lead into an attic; wood decks; wood shingles; wood fences; and any plants, lawn furniture, cars, sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house — all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder. Hardening a home means covering them up, replacing material that burns with material that doesn’t, and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house, an area state regulators call “zone zero”
Ember-proofing alone isn’t always enough. In urban conflagrations, like the ones in Los Angeles, flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds, turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors. The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames 20 feet away.
In those conditions, cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance.
Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, places his hand on a window shudder made out of non-combustible stucco material on a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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Adriana Heldiz
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Enclosed eaves that prevent heat buildup are installed on a home.
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A non-combustible metal fence is placed in front of a five-foot buffer zone in the backyard of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles, they found repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window, a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay.
Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire. In Maui, after the Lahaina waterfront burned in 2023, images of a single red-roofed home, lonely and seemingly untouched, went viral. Reporting later revealed that just prior to the disaster, the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation. They were trying to keep out termites, not flames, but fire doesn’t consider motive.
There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house, but if vulnerability to disaster is a numbers game, home hardening — like seat belts, bike helmets and vaccines — can up the odds of survival.
Pilots and programs
The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a $117 million pilot project.
The California Wildfire Mitigation Program, run jointly by the California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state.
The program seeks to tackle the problem of fire resilience at a community scale. Managing wildfire risk is a bit like managing an infectious disease: There’s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected.
Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.
— Yana Valachovic, forest health and fire expert, University of California
The pilot was launched by the legislature in 2019, but is only just beginning to get off the ground. So far, 21 homes have been retrofitted: 19 in Kelseyville, Lake County and two in Dulzura, east of San Diego. Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California’s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process.
Each house presents its own array of costly challenges. New roofs, new siding, new windows, replacing decks, cleaning brush. “We don’t want to just kinda harden the home,” said Deanna Fernweh, program manager for the Lake County project.
This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way. Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source, particularly if you need something to be just the right size. Local contractors don’t always know much about fire risk, nor do the local permitting officials. Some counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages. With most of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards. Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn’t disturb migratory or endangered birds.
An aerial view of homes in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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All of that adds to the price tag. The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly $36,000, said J. Lopez, executive director of the statewide program. That was a tidy, well-maintained home in Kelseyville. The most expensive so far was $110,000. At current funding levels, the program is on track to harden roughly 2,000 homes.
That’s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state. But Lopez said part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive, delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood — and then figure out ways to make it all less so.
“When the VCR first came out, I think the first ones were about $1,500,” he said. “I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions — and we are part of that, helping move that along.”
The pilot is currently set to expire in 2029, though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent. Future funding remains an open question. So far FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program, which provides much of the funding for the California program, has been spared the cuts that have felled other emergency response and preparedness initiatives under the Trump administration.
Legislators may also take up legislation this year to shave off some of the tax revenue the state currently collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant program for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work. Another bill would create a “Community Hardening Commission” inside the state’s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones. A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification program, with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state’s imprimatur.
“Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening,” Assemblymember Steve Bennett, an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill, said at a budget committee hearing in February. “We’ve talked about it and talked about it, but we’re not really making much progress.”
Locals step up
Absent a comprehensive statewide hardening program, some cities are trying to fill the gaps.
In 2020, Marin County voted overwhelmingly to tax itself to fund a countywide wildfire prevention program. The program shells out roughly $20 million each year on individualized home safety assessments, home hardening and vegetation clearing grants and evacuation route clearing operations.
In the city of Novato, the local fire district has used those funds to inspect every house in town. Homeowners can apply for matching grants — up $1,500 for home hardening and $1,000 for brush clearing.
Sometimes that’s enough to cover the cost of the work. Vent screens aren’t expensive, and vegetation management can be cheap if a homeowner is willing to do the work themselves.
Homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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But often the grants aren’t nearly enough to cover all the called-for work. In Novato at least, a financial nudge is often all that people need, said Fire Marshal Lynne Osgood. According to data collected by the fire district over the last fiscal year, the city doled out half a million dollars in these matching grants to fund home-hardening projects; homeowners spend four times that amount.
“(Novato homeowners) are getting pressure from the insurance companies, they’re seeing, year after year, major conflagrations where thousands upon thousands of people are losing their homes,” Osgood said. “They are highly motivated.”
Where Marin County is offering carrots, other cities are using sticks. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley just passed its own “zone zero” regulations which will require hill-dwelling residents to keep the five feet around their homes free of plants, wood fencing and other flammable odds and ends. The new policy will go into effect at the beginning of next year when it will be enforced with the possibility of daily fines.
That’s a few years ahead of the rest of the state. Cal Fire is scrambling to cobble together specific “zone zero” regulations for all high hazard areas, something a state law directed them to do by 2023. In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the department to “accelerate” its regulatory process and produce a final rule by the end of the year. The most recent draft of the regulations would give homeowners three years to comply.
'Do this or you’re done'
Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley, just west of the Tahoe National Forest, since the late 1980s. In 2022, it started a specific division for home hardening.
“We’re seeing a real groundswell of interest,” said Jeff Fierstein, the company’s general manager. Some of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires, which put fire risk top of mind for many.
But he said roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress. “The insurance companies are saying ‘Do this or you’re done,’” he said.
Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin’s resources or Berkeley’s political appetite for new mandates. For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface, the most powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company’s premium hike or non-renewal notice.
A regulation from 2023 is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities, voluntary neighborhood disaster preparedness groups. But the approval process has been slow, the discounts vary from carrier to carrier, the requirements coming from insurers don’t always match the state’s own standards and the savings on offer are, according to some, miserly.
California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood. After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses, surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory environment that doesn’t allow them to cover their costs, many carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers.
That dour climate might begin to change soon, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the industry association, the Insurance Information Institute. The state’s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of policy changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the market. That overhaul “should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies,” putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break.
An aerial view of homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.
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Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change, said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s law school.
Earlier this month, Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released a new, first-of-its-kind insurance policy for Tahoe-Donner, one of the country’s largest homeowners associations. In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work, the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly 40% off on its insurance policy.
“It's a very conservative industry,” he said. “You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”
The upside: The new policy shows that at least one insurer — in this case, Globe Underwriting, based in London — believes it can account for the reduced risk that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass some of those savings onto customers.
The downside: The policy only covers commonly held land, not individual homes and, at least for now, the Nature Conservancy is footing the $55,000 annual premium.
“The big success here is that the insurance policy was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest treatment work that the homeowners association is undertaking,” said Jones.
Whether it’s forest management programs, zone zero mandates or home hardening grants, the public is only going to support these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance market and bring down premiums, he said.
“Part of what we're trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done, convince insurers to do it, but also continue to build public support for these necessary investments,” said Jones. “Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do.”
LA public art experience debuts on Valentine's Day
James Chow
produces SoCal arts and culture coverage and news podcast Imperfect Paradise for LAist's on-demand team.
Published February 13, 2026 7:30 AM
Top row (left to right): Sarah Rara, Beatie Wolfe, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, claire rousay, Media Pollution; Bottom row (left to right): L. Frank, Carmina Escobar, Odeya Nini, Qur’an Shaheed, Kerstin Larissa Hovland and Emery C. Martin.
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Topline:
On Valentine’s Day, a free public art exhibition focused on sound and light will appear across 10 locations in L.A. County. The event, called Attune 1.0, encourages participants to put their phones down and have an interactive experience with the program.
What to expect: Live acoustic performances from L.A.-based artists L. Frank, Carmina Escobar, claire rousay, Odeya Nini, Beatie Wolfe, Qur’an Shaheed, Sarah Rara and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson will be simulcast via an old school television installed at each of the participating L.A. County sites.
The performances will be book-ended by L. Frank, a Tongva artist who will sing in their indigenous language. The musicians will put on sets ranging from 15-30 minutes. A pyramid-like installation will display different color hues as the performances play out.
Why now: “We want to amplify love,” said Carmen Zella, who’s owner and chief curator of creative arts agency NOW Art and co-founder of NXT Art Foundation. “ As we think about Los Angeles and everything that we've been through together — the fires, these ICE raids — we need to be able to have these moments of connectedness with our community in its entirety.”
List of participating locations:
East Hollywood: Barnsdall Park
Northeast Los Angeles: Sycamore Grove Park
Exposition Park: Jessie Brewer Jr. Park
Porter Ranch: Jane and Bert Boeckmann Park
Lake View Terrance: Hansen Dam
South Los Angeles: Leimert Park
Culver City: Wende Museum
Long Beach: Promenade Square Park
Santa Monica: Tongva Park
Altadena: Loma Alta Park
How to attend: The event is free and will last from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Zella recommends RVSP’ing to get more information about preparing for the exhibition.
Jacob Margolis
covers science, with a focus on environmental stories and disasters.
Published February 13, 2026 5:00 AM
We got soaked in December, and we're due for another soaking here in mid-February.
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Myung J. Chun
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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Topline:
Several days of rain are forecast to kick off Sunday as a series of storms rolls through, one after another. It’ll be one of the coldest weather systems we’ve seen so far this year, bringing a whole lot of much-needed snow to California, according to the National Weather Service.
Rainfall timing: The heaviest rain is expected to fall on Monday, with 2 to 4 inches possible in the Los Angeles area. Then, there will be on-and-off precipitation for the remainder of the week, though there’s a lot of uncertainty about exactly when you’ll need to have your umbrella handy. Thunderstorms could bring isolated pockets of heavy rainfall, potentially causing debris flows. Things should dry out by late next week.
About the snow: The coldest part of the weather system is expected to arrive on Tuesday, dropping snow levels to around 4,000 feet in Southern California. Two to 3 feet of snow could fall at higher elevations throughout the week, including at ski resorts. We could see anywhere from 4 to 6 feet of snow along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, from Mammoth past Lake Tahoe, along the crest of the Sierra. That's all good news for California's snowpack, which is well below average for this time of year.
Coming up: Another storm could arrive the week of Feb. 22, though it’s still a bit too far out to tell.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
Mariana Dale
explores and explains the forces that shape how and what kids learn from kindergarten to high school.
Published February 12, 2026 4:22 PM
Ricardo Lopez said he's been a teacher for about a decade. The 2025-26 school year was his second at Synergy Quantum Academy.
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Topline:
A former South L.A. charter school teacher says he was fired after he opened a campus gate so students could leave and join a protest of federal immigration activity.
What happened? Last week, Synergy Quantum Academy students joined regional walkouts protesting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. But with the South L.A. school’s tall metal gate shut, some opted to climb and jump over it. Teacher Ricardo Lopez said he opened the gate out of concern for the safety of students who might have hurt themselves leaving the school.
What did he do wrong? In messages to parents and staff, Synergy's principal said an "unauthorized staff member" opened the campus' gate in conflict with LAUSD protocol. A plan provided to LAist states “if students leave campus, school site administrators do not have a legal obligation to protect the safety and welfare of the students.” The document provided does not explicitly prohibit a staff member from opening a gate.
Why it matters: The dismissal has spurred further protests and raised questions about whose responsibility it is to ensure safety as students exercise their First Amendment rights.
Last week, Synergy Quantum Academy students joined regional walkouts protesting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. But with the South L.A. school’s tall metal gate shut, some opted to climb and jump over it.
The school’s leadership wrote in messages to parents and staff that an “unauthorized staff member” then opened that campus gate — in conflict with Los Angeles Unified School District protocol.
That staff member, teacher Ricardo Lopez, said he acted out of concern for the safety of students who might have hurt themselves trying to leave the school.
He said the school fired him the same day. Now his dismissal has spurred further protests and raised questions about whose responsibility it is to ensure safety as students exercise their First Amendment rights.
Here’s what we know
Thousands of students across Los Angeles walked out during the first week of February to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including students at Synergy Quantum Academy.
Lopez said that after the walkouts on Feb. 4, he heard several students talk about injuring themselves climbing over the metal fences that surround the South L.A. school.
On Thursday morning, during his academic prep period, Lopez said he saw students trying to climb over the metal gate on the north side of the campus.
“When I saw one of my [AP U.S. History] students climbing the fence and jumping…and like almost falling, I started rushing towards the gate,” Lopez said. “ I opened the gate for them so other students wouldn’t get hurt like the day before.”
Guidance from the ACLU of Southern California related to student walkouts states “locking exits to the school can pose serious health and safety concerns for students and staff.”
Lopez said he opened this gate on the north side of Synergy Quantum Academy and Maya Angelou Community High School's shared campus after watching students attempt to climb over Thursday Feb. 5.
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Lopez said within an hour, Synergy’s human resources department informed him that he’d been terminated for insubordination. Lopez said there was no hearing or additional meeting where he was able to defend his actions.
“What hurts even more was that they escorted me out like I was a — I felt like a criminal,” Lopez said.
The contents of his classroom were later boxed and sent to him via a third-party delivery service.
Lopez said it’s still unclear to him why he was fired. He said staff received an email earlier in the week telling them not to participate in student protests, but there was no mention of any policy related to the gate.
“ I wasn't participating [in the protest],” Lopez said. “To me it was about protecting students from getting hurt.”
What has the school communicated?
The school’s public justification for terminating Lopez intersects with a longstanding source of friction in Los Angeles schools — the co-location of independent charter schools on the campuses of traditional district schools.
Synergy Quantum Academy shares a campus with Los Angeles Unified's Maya Angelou Community High School. Synergy is an independent charter school with a separate staff overseen by a board of directors outside of the district.
In messages to parents and staff, Synergy's principal said opening the gate conflicted with LAUSD protocol.
Synergy Quantum Academy enrolled 564 students in the 2024-2025 school year and is one of several charter schools operated by Synergy Academies.
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Synergy Academies CEO Rhonda Deomampo confirmed Lopez is no longer employed at the school.
In response to LAist's inquiry about which protocol was violated, Deomampo wrote in an email that Maya Angelou Community High School’s safety plan “clearly outlines the authority of the principal or designee in situations like these.” She also said “to date, the school has received no reports of student injuries related to student protests.”
The excerpt provided from the 206-page safety plan states it is the responsibility of the principal or designee to “maintain adequate safeguards to ensure the safety and welfare of students” during a walkout. The plan states “if students leave campus, school site administrators do not have a legal obligation to protect the safety and welfare of the students.” The document provided does not explicitly prohibit a staff member from opening a gate.
How is LAUSD involved?
A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson said while independent charter schools are expected to follow district policies related to walkouts, the district does not weigh in on personnel decisions.
“Independent charter schools are responsible for the supervision and management of the charter school employees,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Lopez said at Synergy, like many charter schools, he was an “at-will” employee, which means he can be terminated with or without cause and does not have the additional protections associated with union membership.
Community calls for teacher’s reinstatement
Lopez said he has a shared background with many of his students as the son of undocumented, working, immigrant parents who didn’t have an opportunity to pursue higher education themselves.
“That's one of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher because a lot of things that I learned [in college] really helped me grow,” Lopez said. Teaching was a way to pay forward that knowledge.
“ I really miss my students, you know, I miss being in the classroom,” Lopez said. “ I just want to be reinstated, you know, and just keep, keep doing what I'm doing, teaching and supporting my students and protecting my students.”
Lopez said he is also worried that the termination could jeopardize his teaching credential or ability to get future jobs as an educator.
On Tuesday, dozens of students from both Maya and Synergy joined with organizers from Unión del Barrio and the Association of Raza Educators to rally for Lopez’s reinstatement.
Ayleen was a junior in Lopez's AP U.S. History class. “ When he sees that a student's not OK, he asks them personally and he doesn't embarrass them in front of everybody," she said.
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Synergy junior Ayleen said she didn’t participate in Wednesday’s walkout, but heard about peers who’d jumped the fence and gotten hurt. Ayleen requested to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy.
“We truly believe that he shouldn't have been fired for protecting a student,” she said. “That's his number one priority as a teacher, protecting his students, and he's the only one that upheld that that day.”
Lopez was Ayleen’s AP U.S. History teacher. AP classes culminate in a rigorous test where students can earn college credit.
“He has this way of teaching that he helps so much because he re-words questions,” Ayleen said. “It sounds simple, but so many teachers don't do that. He genuinely helps us to learn.”
Ayleen’s mother, Mary, said she supported her daughter’s decision to join the Friday walkout in protest of Lopez’s termination and would like the school to bring him back.
According to an Instagram post, students from Maya and Synergy plan to participate in another walkout Friday — still against ICE, but now also in support of their former teacher.
Destiny Torres
is LAist's general assignment and digital equity reporter.
Published February 12, 2026 3:30 PM
The National Park Service is asking for public input for its study on whether the L.A. coastline should qualify for national park designation.
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Topline:
The National Park Service is asking for public input for its study on whether the L.A. coastline between Torrance and Santa Monica should qualify for national park designation.
Background: Congress signed a law in 2022 that called for this study, as well as provided funding for the three-year process. The first virtual meeting about the study was held this week.
How to participate: The Park Service is holding another virtual meeting on March 11 at 6 p.m.
Webinar link: https://bit.ly/4akUPVE
Join by phone: (202) 640-1187, Conference ID: 362420885#
Who makes the final call? The National Park Service is looking into the move, but the decision ultimately falls to Congress and the president.
Read on … for what it takes for an area to become a national park.
The National Park Service is asking for public input for its study on whether the L.A. coastline between San Pedro and Santa Monica should qualify for national park designation.
Federal officials held a public meeting Wednesday and outlined the study process.
Lawmakers will use the findings to decide whether to designate the stretch of coastline — which includes the Santa Monica Pier, Ballona Creek and RAT Beach — a national park.
Sarah Bodo, project manager at NPS, said the coastline is interpreted as part of the sea to approximately 200 yards inland.
“The 200-yard number is an effort to include the beach areas and the public lands, while excluding private property from the study area,” Bodo said. “In cases where private property is within 200 yards, those properties are excluded from the study.”
What are the criteria?
To become a national park, the area needs to contain nationally significant resources, not already be in the national park system and require direct NPS management.
Sequoia National Park, for example, was recognized in 1890 to protect the giant trees from logging.
Officials will also consider where the access, cost and size of the area can be managed by the department.
The National Park Service is studying whether the red portions of the L.A. coastline should qualify for national park designation.
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“A study area must meet all four of the criteria,” Bodo said.
What happens now?
The agency is early in the study process. If you have thoughts on the matter, now is the time to share them.
The public comment period is open until April 6.
In the coming months, the agency will review that feedback before preparing a study report for Congress.
Only Congress and the president have the ability to designate a new national park.
“At that point, it will be up to Congress or the president to take action or not. There is no timeline for further action from Congress or the president,” Bodo said. “The completion of the study does not establish a new park unit.”
The process could take years. The last designation given to Missouri’s Ste. Genevieve National Historic Park in 2018, according to the Associated Press. Congress ordered the study for that park in 2005.
Outstanding questions
One question raised at Wednesday’s meeting was what the benefits and downsides of having NPS manage this area are.
Bodo said that would depend on what the legislation would say if designated and how management would work.
“The National Park Service is required to conserve unimpaired scenery, natural and historic objects, wildlife of parks, and to provide for their enjoyment by the public. That's our overall mission,” Bodo said. “National parks can also generate economic activity in nearby communities.”
And, if designated, how exactly would management of this area work?
It’s also still too early to say, but existing property owners, like the county or city, could continue to own and manage the property, Bodo added.
“If this were to be designated, there maybe wouldn't be significant changes in that arena,” Bodo said. “The Park Service would seek to work collaboratively with local communities and existing agencies on common goals for resource protection and recreational opportunities.”
Another question asked was how might Park Service involvement along the L.A. coast affect fishing and hunting regulations?
“That's really dependent on land ownership, so if land ownership did not change, nothing would change,” Bodo said.
How you can participate
The National Park Service is looking for public input. A second virtual meeting will be held March 11 at 6 p.m. You can join here.
Public comments are also being accepted online here.
