How a Palisades teacher is rebuilding his classroom’s US history collection

Last January, Robert King watched on TV as the school where he’s taught for 30 years burned in the Palisades Fire.

The blaze destroyed 30% of Palisades Charter High School and closed the campus for a year. The U.S. history teacher returned to the school for the first time last week ahead of the school’s Jan. 27 reopening.

“To be back here in my classroom — as I started in this room, actually in 1996 — it's just an incredible, joyful thing for me,” King said.

While his classroom is still standing, King lost the collection of posters, books and other artifacts he used to tell the story of our country’s history from the colonial era to the modern day.

“One of the reasons I've been working all week to set up the room is I want normalcy,” King said. “I want [students] to be able to connect with the room. I want them to feel that this is a place that is comfortable for them and a place that they can learn.”

King's classroom on the eve of students' return to campus for the first time since the Palisades Fire.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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How the fire changed Pali High

Pali opened as part of the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1961 and now as an independent charter school it enrolls 2,400 students from throughout Los Angeles. The school’s palm trees and grassy quad have appeared in a handful of movies and shows including Freaky Friday (the 2003 Lindsay Lohan edition) and Carrie.

When King first arrived last week, a chunk of that picturesque campus was gone. He avoided the north side of the campus where the J building and baseball fields once stood.

A grassy field at Palisades Charter High School where an academic building once stood.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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“ I thought ‘OK that's not the school,’” King said. “‘I don't know that.’”

King said now that he’s had some time to process the change, he’s started to imagine how his students will see the grassy expanse after spending much of the last year in a refurbished Santa Monica department store.

“They're gonna love having a big open space,” King said. “That part of it is kind of joyful, but it is just so different.”

As part of the post-fire clean-up, the Los Angeles Unified School District stripped King’s room of nearly everything he’d collected over his career.

A photo of King's classroom before the Palisades Fire.

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Courtesy Robert King

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King's classroom on Mon. Jan. 26, 2025, the day before students returned to campus for the first time since the Palisades Fire.

A framed September 12, 2001 front page of the L.A. Times that reads “Terrorists Attack New York, Pentagon,” and a copy of a World War I documentary on VHS are a few of the only items left from before the fire.

There’s also a metal sign that reads “The King is in residence” on the wall above the whiteboard. Next to it is a new sensor, part of a network set up throughout the Palisades schools to monitor air quality.

Rebuilding a history collection

King has had help rebuilding his collection.

“Some of the things that I truly loved, kids remembered,” King said.

A family's unwanted collection of campaign buttons now has a new home in King's classroom.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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A former student ordered a new copy of the World War II era poster of Rosie the Riveter.

“Before I even was able to start setting up at Sears, I had gotten it in the mail,” King said.

A New York Times reader donated a collection of vintage campaign buttons after reading about the school’s relocation in the paper.

“When I get to each of these elections, I'm now gonna have something to be able to hold up to the kids,” King said. “We can even look at what's on the buttons to even see what the story was, … How were they using these buttons to advertise what was gonna happen in that election?”

Last summer King traveled through Georgia and Alabama and stopped at several famous civil rights landmarks, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

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Courtesy Robert King

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This summer King went to Alabama and Georgia. On a road trip from Selma to Montgomery, he picked up a poster of (and walked across) the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers beat nonviolent civil rights protestors in 1965.

“ I like things to be able to tell a story. That's my approach to teaching history,” King said. “ When I put things on the wall, it's with an idea that I will bring it in as part of the story later on.”

King said he remembers what’s been lost as he moves through his lesson plans for the year.

For example, he imagines reaching for a copy of Only Yesterday from the bookshelf behind his desk to read a passage to his students about the 1920s, and remembering it’s not there.

He plans to share these moments as they happen with the class.

“ I'll say, ‘I had this and this is what I would've done,’” King said. “And we'll kind of have a moment with that.”