SFUSD staff members support wildfire victims in Butte County

Laurie Vargas was glad to help a group of energetic 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds transition from recess and back to their classroom on a recent Friday. She watched them closely for indicators of their general social and emotional wellbeing.

“Their emotions were up and down, I’m sure, for that age,” Laurie recalled.

The transitional kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade students weren’t coming back into their usual classroom. Instead, the majority of Pine Ridge Elementary students were being housed at a church in Oroville, Calif., because their elementary school was damaged in the devastating Camp Fire last month.

Laurie is an SFUSD wellness counselor who was one of more than 30 staff from the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) who signed up to travel north to help provide counseling and trauma-recovery support to the families impacted by the devastating Camp Fire.

According to news reports, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history to date. At least 19,000 buildings were destroyed, including five public schools in the town of Paradise.

The classroom where Laurie volunteered on Dec. 7 wasn’t actually housed with its other school classes in the church; instead, students and the teacher were several blocks away, at another school site, which Laurie says only added to the isolation felt by the teacher and students.

When Laurie, who also serves as the District Program Coordinator for Mentoring for Success, arrived in Butte County, she wasn’t sure what to expect. But she went to where the school’s principal said she was needed most: right into a classroom to support the students. And that’s where she stayed the entire day, including checking in with families as they picked up their kids after school.

“The students knew I was from out of the area,” Laurie said. “Quite a few of them told me their experiences. They just wanted to feel like they had somebody who cared about them. I went to let them know, ‘We do care about you, and we want to make sure you’re feeling OK,” she added.

That’s precisely why Kevin Truitt, Chief of SFUSD’s Student, Family & Community Support Division, requested SFUSD social workers get paid release time to support in Butte County as needed.

“We believe it is a powerful message to send to our students that when tragedies like this occur, it is important for everyone to offer support to others whose lives have been forever changed and are experiencing such heartbreak and trauma,” Truitt said.

He added, “Humanity, compassion, empathy, and kindness are certainly the traits that we, as educators, must model for our students whenever we can as they are growing and maturing into the adults we want them to become.”

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