Pasadena Gardener plays a key role in school cleansing after the late Eaton

The community of Juan Villegas was still burning in the afternoon of January 8. But there was a place where he had to go to: Eliot Arts Magnet Academy, his Alma Mater.

The Pasadena Middle School had welcomed Villegas at the age of 12 in Mexico. It was there that he found his place in a new strange country, connecting with other Latin immigrants and making friends for life.

He had heard that the campus had been destroyed, but rumors quickly traveled during the early hours of Eaton’s fire. Someone had told him that Super King Market on Lincoln Avenue had burned, but it was wrong. Maybe, in one way or another, the school was ok.

The roads near Eliot were closed. But Villegas knew a way to get around the closure of avenue Lincoln. He has crossed residential districts, where the flames have always believed in the conduits of cut houses from the flowing houses, and the ashes rained from the sky.

Then he arrived in Eliot. The imposing bell tower of the almost 100 year old school was still standing – but a large part of the campus on Avenue Lake had been destroyed.

“I was in shock,” said Villegas. “It brought me back when I started in Eliot – it was my first school here in America and now the whole place had disappeared. And I thought of the number of other schools could go through this. We did not know how much we had lost. »»

As the main gardener of the Unified School District of Pasadena, Villegas would soon receive the most important mission of his career for several decades: supervising the cleaning of campuses in the race to recover some 14,000 children in class. In the past few weeks, Villegas, like thousands of others in his community, found himself working with the shock of a miserable month: his father had just died, the house of his in-laws burned and the school land was in ruins.

That afternoon, when he welcomed the smoking ball from the historic college of Pasadena Unified, it was too much to bear.

“That’s when it struck me,” said Villegas, 49. “I broke down and tears started to flow.”

A monumental task

Villegas knows the subtleties of the 24 Unified Pasadena campuses. Located about 226 acres in Altadena, Sierra Madre and Pasadena, schools serve a diversified population and offer multilingual education, from science and arts, among other programs.

On January 8, they were all closed.

Five campuses were seriously burned. Many have survived the conflagration, but before they could reopen, schools had to be cleaned – inside and out. The district said that it would not welcome the return students until its properties have been evaluated and confirmed by an environmental test company. He “carried out in -depth tests in various places in the affected school buildings”, evaluating Sot, Char and Ash, said the district.

In the end, Pasadena Unified reopened in phases over two weeks, bringing the final group at the end of the month. Despite the district efforts, some parents told Times that they were not sure he was sure for their children to return to class. Pasadena Unified, who published the results of her environmental tests, insisted that her campuses are sure.

Most workers grouping schools have been contracted by Pasadena Unified. But the district maintenance and operations staff, including Villegas, who oversees five colleagues, was an integral part of the plan. The 12 internal gardeners concentrated on external cleaning, using chainsaws and rakes to remove the fallen trees and the large branches before turning to push the brushes to clean the smallest debris.

“We all depend on everyone here, in particular Juan,” said Michael Corrales, Deputy Director of District Operations and Maintenance during a January 23 visit to Jackson primary school, while Villegas And other gardeners worked nearby.

Their task was more difficult due to the temporary prohibition of Pasadena on the use of leaf blowers to limit the spread of dangerous particles. Standing outside Jackson, Villegas said that he was aspired when he returned from small everyday moments – like using a leave of leaves, then extinguishing him so that a parent or a student can pass.

“We miss that,” he said.

The gardeners – who wore N95 masks, glasses and, in some cases, respirators – have worked methodically. They would stay in a school until it is considered “clear”, said Villegas.

Then it was on the following campus – including another Alma Mater from Villegas, John Muir High School. His cleaning time there would give him a chance to think about his trip from Mexico to the United States and to consider how his unified Pasadena education had helped to shape it.

The new child on campus

Villegas spent his early childhood in Mexico Potrero de Gallegos, a small town about 200 miles north of Guadalajara. In 1987, his parents moved their families in the United States – seven children in all – and settled in Pasadena, where other parents were already living. At first, he lived with his grandparents on Summit avenue.

Villegas still remembers his first trip on a highway: “We had two or three cars in our city, so it was different. All was different. “”

He entered Eliot in sixth year and was placed in an English class as a second language, where there were many students from Mexico and the Central American countries. Bilingual, Villegas could help his new classmates in school work – and experience helped him find his place on campus.

Before a long time, Villegas went to Muir High School. It was the early 90s, and friends were at the center of which. He was a social teenager who “spent time with bad children,” he said seriously. It helped that Villegas had a car – a 1983 Ford Fairmont. It was a work trip that he prevented for his huge trunk and spacious interior, which turned out to be useful when he and his friends would cut the lessons and went to the beach.

Villegas time in Muir has been interrupted. When his grandfather suffered a stroke in his last year, he left school to take care of him. Villegas still thinks of obtaining his graduate of high school.

He needed to find work and a brother helped put it in place as a residential gardener. It was a natural adjustment – Villegas had always liked to work outside. Before a long time, he had 75 customers.

His personal life was also flourished. Villegas met Nora Arevalo in a Quinceañera in 1995. “She moved with me three months later,” he said, “and we have been together since.” At the end of the year, they got married. Then came the children: Juan Jr. in 1996, Jorge in 1997 and Angel a decade later.

Soon, the boys registered in the unified elementary schools Pasadena – and all three were finally going to attend Muir. Taking them on various campuses, Villegas said that he sometimes thought that landscaping could “be a little better for children”.

Villegas was hired by the district as a gardener in 2003. His eldest sons were amazed by their father’s new concert. “They saw me on the first day of the uniform of their school,” he said, “and they wanted to take photos with me.”

He always remembers what he heard them say to their friends: “He’s my father there.”

‘According to’ Villegas

One month before the fire, Juan’s father, Enrique Villegas, died at 74 years old. Then the house of his in-laws burned.

“The whole block where they live has disappeared,” said Villegas, whose own house near Muir was unscathed.

Villegas took a short leave in mid-January to take care of his father’s commemorative service. And then he joined the district reopening race, already well in progress.

Although the gardeners had their own responsibilities, Villegas said that he and his crew attached loose ends after the departure of contract workers. “We made sure everything was clean. … Whatever they lacked, we went behind and cleaned up, “he said.

This did not surprise the director of Muir Lawton Gray, who had attended school alongside Villegas. The director – who dismantled when he was asked for years of high school from his classmate – said that the gardener has always paid attention to little things.

“He comes here the weekend and locks the doors if he sees that they are open,” said Gray. “He has always been there for schools and students.”

Working at Muir on a rainy morning in February, Villegas took a break near a chain fence where he and his crew had just reduced an oleanier invaded by vegetation. Nearby, the pruning of a carrot wood lay in a walk. He seemed in his element among the greenery and the chainsaws.

In Muir, which reopened on January 30, Villegas and its crew had released fallen trees, repaired other damage caused by the wind and ensured that the workers in the contract had left unpleasant interior spaces. Even after the courses resumed, they always did a preventive interview, such as the elimination of heavy trees.

“To be honest, they have never been so beautiful,” said Villegas about the landscaping of schools. “We did more than what we do normally.”

But it was not always easy. Villegas has spent the best part of the last months in mourning. For his father. And his community.

However, even during this horrible visit of January 8 to Eliot, Villegas noticed something that gave him hope. A massive oak – the one who, according to him, is regularly the subject of complaints according to which he should be shot, because of his size – had survived the fire.

It has not yet been able to inspect the robust tree and do not know if it has been burned by the flames.

But he’s still standing. For the moment, it’s enough.