By Mike Myslinski, CTA Communications
November 2, 2007
In the swift-moving hurricane of fires in Southern California, many teachers lost their homes and now face months or years of rebuilding.
The loss was much more tragic at one Escondido school, where students and educators lost an inspiring friend and colleague, sixth-grade teacher Victoria Fox.
Her story, and the stories of all educators’ lives touched by the flames, speak to the unprecedented chaos the fires caused in the education community. At their peak, the wildfires – fueled by furious Santa Ana winds – shut scores of schools, directly affecting up to 1.3 million students and 62,000 school employees, according to estimates by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell.
Fox taught for 22 years in the Escondido Union School District in San Diego County, the last six at Rincon Middle School. She taught humanities, ran Rincon’s spelling bee and enjoyed staging plays with students. Her legacy will be the enthusiasm she showed for teaching, and the love she had for her students, says her sister Sandra Fox, a teacher in Maryland.
“She always showed her unconditional love for her students. She made her classroom like a home for the kids.”
Eighth-grade Rincon teacher Susan Elliott was a friend and colleague of Fox’s. “Her classroom was like she was – warm and inviting,” she says. “Her kids adored her and were always bringing her small toy foxes for her classroom because of her last name. She gave 100 percent to teaching and was always doing creative things with her students.”
She liked making the student plays work, a colleague at Rincon told a reporter. “She was very resourceful,” teacher Sally Homan says. “She was a great scavenger when it came to finding materials for scenery.”
Her son Michael Bain, 20, a psychology major at a Northern California college, grew up watching his mother correcting papers and speaking often about her classroom adventures. “She wanted to make all of her students into stars. She enjoyed teaching and was always bringing home work to do. After dinner, she would be grading papers for a few hours every night.”
A while back, Fox also served on the representative council of the Escondido Elementary Education Association, says EEEA President Pat Bavender, who visited Rincon and spoke with educators.
The relentless Witch Creek Fire burned 198,000 acres. It consumed half of the more than 2,000 homes destroyed in the numerous firestorms that raged for a week last month, starting on Oct. 21. It overtook Victoria Fox, 55, and her husband, John Christopher Bain, 58, at their rural Highland Valley Road home north of Poway. They had been packing to leave and never got evacuation warnings from authorities.
At least 14 fire-related deaths were reported. The conflagrations burned nearly 500,000 acres and caused the evacuation of more than 500,000 people.
Rincon was planning a memorial to honor the teacher known as Vicky to friends and colleagues. Counselors and psychologists met with her students, and the message sign in front of the school bid farewell with the words: “We Love And Miss You Ms. Fox.”
The Witch Creek Fire roared into nearby Ramona, where educators mobilized to help each other. At least 11 teachers in the Ramona Unified School District lost their homes to the flames, and another two were temporarily homeless due to smoke damage.
Sue Cayan, a member of the bargaining team for the Ramona Teachers Association, lost her home of 27 years not far from Vicky Fox’s house.
Cayan, whose Ramona Unified classroom at Mt. Woodson Elementary was slightly scorched by the flames, praised RTA President Mike Harrelson – who was evacuated for five days from his Jamul home at one point – for filling out paperwork in advance for teacher fire victims to speed up the delivery of $1,500 grants from the CTA Disaster Relief Fund.
(The Ramona CTA chapter mobilized well. At one point in the crisis, the school district asked to use the private RTA member e-mail system to send out emergency messages because it was more effective than the district’s, Harrelson recalls.)
“The winds were gale force” as the fire approached, Cayan says, and kept banging her car doors shut as she packed to flee with her husband, Dan, making quick decisions on what to bring.
The couple saved 25 family photo albums and the family dogs. In their haste, they left behind keepsakes from their son Joe, 24, who died suddenly just seven months ago of a heart ailment. When she returned to the ashes of her home later, Cayan remembered a box of his Mother’s Day cards to her and folders of his first-grade work. All gone.
Amid the rubble, she saw that a garden stepping stone from her second-grade students had survived. The charred stone shows that her students had declared her “#1 teacher” in 2001.
“It was a home we built with our own hands, board by board. You have to learn to let go. We will live in a trailer here as we rebuild. It’s a beautiful piece of land.”
Pam Moore of Poway is one of seven active teachers in the San Diego Unified School District who lost their homes, the district says.
She was shocked the Witch Creek Fire flames moved that fast. As a precaution, she took the three family dogs in her car and drove to her classroom at Scripps Ranch High School, where she is a longtime journalism teacher. But she packed nothing.
Her husband Tom stayed behind and suddenly found himself fighting the flames with a family fire hose that was about 40 feet too short. He called his wife at school.
“The house is going to go,” he told her.
“You’re kidding me.”
“I’m going to go ahead and leave now.”
In the cooling ashes later, she took inventory. The horses were saved. While guns from her dad survived in a fireproof case, everything else was gone, jewelry, an 1880 antique piano. “I lost my mother’s wedding dress that I wore at my wedding and that my daughter was going to wear at hers,” she says quietly. “We just didn’t have time.”
San Dieguito Union High School District teacher Bruce Brewer lost everything, but was upbeat with his students at Torrey Pines High School in San Diego on his first day back after most schools closed for a week.
“I told my students that I have a new project, the rebuilding of my home. And that they have a project, the building of their grades.”
A survivor of prior fires in the area, Brewer had built a custom “fireproof” house on High Valley Road, stucco exterior with tile roof and concrete stairs, with five levels and a 40-foot ceiling. “I built the house. I drove nearly every nail,” says Brewer, who teaches woodworking and computer-aided drafting. “The house was pretty solid.”
Not for the inferno that started with unbelievable winds. “It was like a hurricane. The winds were gusting up to 80 miles per hour. Then the power went out at 3 a.m. We could see the fires down the hill on the far side of Ramona.”
His family fled safely and returned a few days later to find the home destroyed. Hot embers apparently burned through skylights and the house ignited and burned from the inside out.
“I drove my car up, I stopped and looked around my lot. I looked at my house in ashes. That experience is something that stays with you forever.”
He will rebuild on his 4.5 acres, but on a less vulnerable spot. If there is one.
Retired teacher Norma Heeter, past secretary of the San Diego Education Association, had recently remodeled 90 percent of her detached condominium in the Rancho Bernardo area of San Diego. New cabinets, appliances, paint, stucco, resurfaced walls.
It all burned. She and her husband fled safely, but without packing much as flames came closer early in the morning of Oct. 22. “I took the clothes I had on. We got very little.”
She took her sisters visiting from Ohio to the airport and stayed two days with friends until the word came: her home was part of the Rancho Bernardo devastation that claimed about 300 homes. She had fled with her wedding ring and her 35th wedding anniversary rings, but other jewelry and keepsakes melted in the flames.
Retired teacher Suzanne Emery was lucky this time.
The Cedar Fire in 2003 ate up part of the porch of her house in rural Poway. This time, the Witch Creek Fire forced her and her husband Bob to evacuate as fire crackled a quarter-mile away.
Packing up was eerie. “It is the eerie silence in the smoke-filled morning, without the call of birds, with no local motor traffic, and only time on your hands to wait. Life is suspended and you are alone with your memories as you fill the car with albums and mementos and an overnight bag.”
They spent the time in their motor home and helped serve meals at a local shelter, where about 500 people took refuge from the smoke and red-hot embers.
The former journalism instructor who taught for 35 years in San Diego Unified returned home to find it unscathed.
Her advice as a disaster survivor? Know in advance what you will pack up and take with you.
“You can’t be stupid or you can get killed,” she says. “No house or horse or recalcitrant cat is worth your life. Planning needs to happen now, not as flames approach. And think about an evacuation route. Several of them.”