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- Juan Villegas, a lead gardener for the Pasadena Unified School District, played an important role in preparing campuses for reopening after the Eaton fire.
- The Mexican immigrant, who came to the U.S. when he was 12, also went to public schools in Pasadena. Now, he works on those campuses.
- Villegas broke down in tears when he learned the fate of Eliot Arts Magnet Academy, his alma mater.
Juan Villegas’ community was still burning on the afternoon of Jan. 8. But there was one place he had to get to: Eliot Arts Magnet Academy, his alma mater.
The Pasadena middle school had welcomed Villegas as a 12-year-old from Mexico. It’s where he found his footing in a strange new country, connecting with other Latino immigrants and making lifelong friends.
He’d heard the campus had been destroyed, but rumors traveled fast during the initial hours of the Eaton fire. Someone had told him that Super King Market on Lincoln Avenue had burned, but that had turned out to be wrong. Maybe, somehow, the school was OK.
Roads near Eliot were closed. But Villegas knew a way around the Lincoln Avenue closure. He passed through residential neighborhoods, where flames still spewed from the severed gas lines of smoldering homes, and ash rained from the sky.
Then he arrived at Eliot. The imposing bell tower of the nearly 100-year-old school was still standing — but much of the Lake Avenue campus had been destroyed.
“I was in shock,” Villegas said. “It took me back to when I started at Eliot — this was my first school here in America and now the whole place was gone. And I was thinking about how many other schools might be going through this. We weren’t sure how many we had lost.”
As a lead gardener for the Pasadena Unified School District, Villegas would soon receive the most important assignment of his decades-long career: supervise the grounds cleanup of campuses in the race to get some 14,000 children back to class. For the last several weeks, Villegas, like thousands of others in his community, found himself working through the shock of a miserable month: His father had just died, his in-laws’ house burned down, and school grounds were in shambles.
That afternoon, when he took in the smoking husk of Pasadena Unified’s landmark middle school, it was all too much to bear.
“That’s when it hit me,” said Villegas, 49. “I broke down, and tears started coming down.”
A monumental task
Villegas knows the intricacies of all 24 Pasadena Unified campuses. Set on about 226 acres across Altadena, Sierra Madre and Pasadena, the schools serve a diverse population and offer multilingual, science- and arts-focused education, among other programs.
On Jan. 8, they were all closed.
Five campuses were badly burned. Many survived the conflagration, but before they could reopen, the schools had to be cleaned — inside and out. The district said it wouldn’t welcome back students until its properties were evaluated and confirmed safe by an environmental testing company. It “conducted extensive tests at various locations within the affected school buildings,” assessing soot, char and ash, the district has said.
Ultimately, Pasadena Unified reopened schools in phases over two weeks, bringing the final group back at the month’s end. Despite the district’s effort, some parents have told The Times that they weren’t sure it was safe for their children to return to class. Pasadena Unified, which released the results of its environmental testing, has insisted its campuses are safe.
Most of the workers swarming the schools were contracted by Pasadena Unified. But the district’s maintenance and operations staff, among them Villegas, who oversees five colleagues, was integral to the plan. The 12 in-house gardeners focused on exterior cleanup, using chainsaws and rakes to clear fallen trees and large branches before turning to push brooms to clean smaller debris.
“We are all depending on everyone here, especially Juan,” Michael Corrales, assistant director of operations and maintenance for the district, said during a Jan. 23 visit to Jackson Elementary School, as Villegas and other gardeners worked nearby.
Their task was more difficult because of Pasadena’s temporary ban on the use of leaf blowers to limit the spread of hazardous particulates. Standing outside Jackson, Villegas said he longed for the return of little, everyday moments — like using a leaf blower, and then turning it off so that a parent or student could pass.
“We miss that,” he said.
The gardeners — who wore N95 masks, goggles and in some cases respirators — worked methodically. They’d stay at a school until it was considered “clear,” Villegas said.
Then it was onto the next campus— including another alma mater of Villegas, John Muir High School. His time cleaning up there would give him a chance to reflect on his journey from Mexico to the U.S. and consider how his Pasadena Unified education had helped shape him.
The new kid on campus
Villegas spent his early childhood in Mexico’s Potrero de Gallegos, a small town about 200 miles north of Guadalajara. In 1987, his parents moved their family to the U.S. — seven kids in all — and settled in Pasadena, where other relatives already lived. At first, he lived with his grandparents on Summit Avenue.
Villegas still remembers his first ride on a freeway: “We had two or three cars in our town, so it was different. Everything was different.”
He entered Eliot in sixth grade and was placed in an English as a Second Language class, where there were many students from Mexico and Central American countries. Bilingual, Villegas could assist his new classmates with schoolwork — and the experience helped him find his footing on campus.
Before long, Villegas moved on to Muir High School. It was the early ’90s, and friends were the focus. He was a social teenager who “hung out with the bad kids,” he said bashfully. It helped that Villegas had a car — a 1983 Ford Fairmont. It was a workaday ride he prized for its huge trunk and roomy interior, which proved useful when he and his friends would cut classes and go to the beach.
Villegas’ time at Muir was cut short. When his grandfather suffered a stroke during his senior year, he left school to care for him. Villegas still thinks about getting his high school degree.
He needed to find work, and a brother helped set him up as a residential gardener. It was a natural fit — Villegas had always liked working outdoors. Before long, he had 75 clients.
His personal life was blossoming, too. Villegas met Nora Arevalo at a quinceañera in 1995. “She moved in with me three months later,” he said, “and we’ve been together ever since.” By year’s end they were married. Then came kids: Juan Jr. in 1996, Jorge in 1997 and Angel a decade later.
Soon the boys were enrolling at Pasadena Unified elementary schools — and all three would eventually attend Muir. Dropping them off at various campuses, Villegas said he sometimes felt that the landscaping could “look a little better for the kids.”
Villegas was hired by the district as a gardener in 2003. His older sons marveled at their father’s new gig. “They saw me the first day in the uniform at their school,” he said, “and they wanted to take pictures with me.”
He still remembers what he heard them tell their friends: “That’s my dad right there.”
‘Depending on’ Villegas
A month before the fire, Juan’s father, Enrique Villegas, died at 74. Then his in-laws’ home burned.
“The whole block where they live is gone,” said Villegas, whose own house near Muir was unscathed.
Villegas took a short leave in mid-January to tend to his father’s memorial service. And then he rejoined the district’s reopening race, already well underway.
Although the gardeners had their own responsibilities, Villegas said that he and his crew tied up any loose ends after the contracted workers left. “We made sure everything was clean. ... Whatever they missed, we went behind and cleaned it up,” he said.
That didn’t surprise Muir Principal Lawton Gray, who had attended the school alongside Villegas. The principal — who demurred when asked about his schoolmate’s high school years — said the gardener always paid attention to the little things.
“He comes here on weekends and locks gates if he sees they are open,” Gray said. “He’s always been there for the schools and the students.”
Working at Muir on a rainy February morning, Villegas took a break near a chain-link fence where he and his crew had just cut back some overgrown oleander. Nearby, prunings from a carrotwood tree lay in a parkway. He seemed in his element among the greenery and chainsaws.
At Muir, which reopened Jan. 30, Villegas and his crew had cleared fallen trees, repaired other wind damage, and made sure the contract workers had left interior spaces spotless. Even after classes resumed, they were still doing preventive maintenance, such as removing unwieldy trees.
“To be honest, they have never looked this nice,” Villegas said of the schools’ landscaping. “We did more than what we normally do.”
But it hasn’t always been easy. Villegas has spent the better part of the last few months grieving. For his father. And his community.
Still, even during that awful Jan. 8 visit to Eliot, Villegas noticed something that gave him hope. A massive oak tree — one that he said is regularly the subject of complaints that it should be cut down, owing to its size — had survived the fire.
He hasn’t been able to inspect the sturdy tree just yet, and doesn’t know if it was scorched by flames.
But it’s still standing. For now, that’s enough.
