Saving Cupcake: The mission to rescue Pasadena's class pets from the Eaton Fire

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.”