Five years after CZU, Bonny Doon Elementary lost students, but found a renewed purpose in healing

Five years after the CZU Lightning Complex fires stopped just short of his school’s campus, Bonny Doon Union Elementary School District Superintendent Mike Heffner says the disaster that upended the community has made the school more safety-conscious, better prepared for another fire and brought greater focus and resources to mental and social health. 

“I have never in any of my jobs been so acutely aware of safety in this way,” said Heffner late last month on the fifth anniversary of the 2020 blazes that ripped through Bonny Doon and surrounding communities, killing one person, destroying nearly 1,500 structures and burning an area more than 10 times the size of the city of Santa Cruz. “I think the fires really changed that in me.”   

The single school district’s campus, located about 15 miles north of downtown Santa Cruz on Pine Flat Road in Bonny Doon, suffered $1 million in smoke damage but largely survived the fires. Just one tree at the school was lost, and the burn line stopped only a couple hundred yards away from the school.

But the real damage wasn’t in the buildings. It was how the fires affected the school community. Bonny Doon Elementary was just a week into the school year when it was forced to close for six weeks. Two staff members and about a dozen families lost their homes, Heffner said. Students, staff and surrounding community members evacuated their properties for weeks. Enrollment has fallen from 110 in 2020 to 95 today, driven by a mix of fire-related issues and broader demographic shifts. And when students finally returned to class, they carried the weight of two traumas — pandemic isolation and natural disaster. 

“You took a community that was pretty solid and, just like poker, scrambled it all up,” said Kendra Turk-Kubo, whose family lost their home within a few days of the start of the fire, launching them on a yearslong recovery. “The school is one of the few nucleation points that the community has. It played an important role in that, and has been a victim of that.” 

Once evacuees could return to their homes, the school soon became their only connection to basic services. With the school acting as a Red Cross distribution center, Bonny Doon Elementary staff, including Heffner, passed out items to residents such as personal protective equipment and shovels. Nonprofit Community Bridges set up a mobile laundromat at the school, and Cruzio Internet installed Wi-Fi because all the power lines had burned. Anyone in the community was welcome to use those services. That included middle and high school students from other school districts who were stuck at home doing remote learning because the pandemic had closed their classrooms.

“Kids who were at Santa Cruz High or Mission Hill [Middle School] were hanging out in our parking lot doing their distance learning because we were the only Wi-Fi, or one of the few places that had Wi-Fi” on the mountain, said Heffner. 

Turk-Kubo, now a trustee on the school’s governing board, remembers the day Heffner appeared at her family’s temporary rental. “He just showed up with food and pastries and didn’t say anything, didn’t ask for anything,” she said. “Just said, here, gave us a hug, and went on his way tracking all of his families.”

Her daughter, Lyra, was just 7 when the fires happened. While Lyra did cry after learning their home had burnt down, Turk-Kubo said her daughter hasn’t expressed any obvious signs of distress or trauma in the years since. The few smaller signs of any impacts, Turk-Kubo said, could be from other factors like the loss of social interactions during the pandemic.

Now 12, Lyra told Lookout she doesn’t recall very much about the fires. She remembers the day the family left their home and playing with her stuffed animal dragons in the weeks after. She doesn’t think the fires harmed her academics, but there are a few ways she thinks she could have been affected. 

Some time after she returned to school, the school did an emergency drill. “I just started freaking out,” she said, “because I wasn’t told that it was a drill.” 

Turk-Kubo said she and her husband, Mike, regularly monitor how Lyra is doing for signs of struggle. “Her dad and I were traumatized,” said Turk-Kubo. “It was a hard time.”

Inside the school, Heffner and his team worked to rebuild more than buildings. A teacher, a parent and Heffner all told Lookout that the aftermath of the CZU fires reinforced the role of the school as a resource center for the wider Bonny Doon community, along with the need for educators to build on the school’s social-emotional and cultural programming and services as students, staff and families recovered.

Enrollment has been declining at Bonny Doon and the county’s other public schools, and most schools are reducing staff hours. The school served about 115 students from kindergarten to sixth grade in 2020, well below its capacity of 225. Today, that’s fallen to about 95 students. But Heffner said Bonny Doon Elementary increased social-emotional counseling from four hours a week to two full days as students returned to school after the fire. 

“We’ve doubled down on providing social-emotional counseling, so even with the declining enrollment, we know that we still have students here who were doubly impacted,” he said. “They went through the isolation of COVID and the fires. So we’ve made sure, regardless of student enrollment, that we’ve got somebody available to help our kids.”

For a full year after the fire, counselors from the Monterey-based Ohana Center provided in-person group meetings and individual counseling free of charge for families who lost homes.

Heffner also brought in a social-emotional wellness specialist to meet with teachers twice a week for one month just a few weeks into the fire. Wendy Baron, who is a social-emotional learning specialist at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, led the online meetings for teachers, instructing them in wellness activities for students and for themselves. She also taught them how the traumatized brain can learn or not. 

“It was a blend between research and practice, with a focus on supporting us to get better and ready,” said Heffner. 

Shortly after students were able to restart their online classes following the fire, Heffner worked with one of the teachers to develop a new role, school climate and culture lead. Kindergartern teacher Kristie Summerrill now spends part of her day planning activities and rallies and generally working to increase a sense of belonging and interactions among students. 

“We’ve become much more intentional post-fire around building cross-grade friendships, and activities that do that,” said Heffner. “So we’ve doubled down on community and culture.”

Summerrill said she plans the monthly assemblies and, on school days, after she’s done teaching kindergarten, she visits other teachers’ classrooms, offers to do read-alouds and to help resolve student conflicts. 

“My role is to keep a pulse on how teachers are feeling, what we’re seeing in classrooms, what we’re noticing from families — and ask: Is this an opportunity to take steps in a different direction?” she said. 

During the rallies, Summerrill said she plans activities that focus on the school’s accomplishments, such as how each class or grade is working toward a certain skill, like responsibility. Heffner also awards a spirit trophy to one class each month that models the school’s rules and values. 

“This can be the avenue that we use to tell the kids, ‘This is who we are at Bonny Doon School,” she said about the celebratory rallies. “This is how we want it to feel.” 

The school’s post-fire enrollment decline has been a challenge, mostly because of the loss of more student interactions as the classes are much smaller, Heffner said. To address that challenge, he said, staff are focused on creating more engagement among the different grades. 

Heffner said some families moved away and never came back after the fires. Some rebuilt, while others moved to different parts of the mountains or county, and some families who didn’t lose homes still decided to leave the area. Others moved to the Bonny Doon area after the fires because rents dropped, only to leave once they realized they didn’t like mountain living.

It’s unclear to what extent the fires affected academics as the pandemic and CZU overlapped. Bonny Doon Elementary student test scores fell in 2022, as they did in most schools in the county and across California. They have since shown signs of recovery and appear to be above 2019 levels.

For Summerrill, who has been at the school almost 20 years, the true measure of whether the school has succeeded in its mission to rebuild community and restore student well-being is not just to return a feeling of normalcy but to make the post-fire Bonny Doon Elementary feel like its pre-fire self again: an “idyllic, fairyland setting in the middle of the redwoods.”

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