Teacher’s Treasure Trove Goes Up in Flames

Fay Rosenthal lost hundreds of aids, but she said the boys who started the fire really destroyed their own things.

Part of Fay Rosenthal’s teaching career was in ashes Wednesday.

Her first thought was to find out which part when she rushed to San Jose Street Elementary School in Mission Hills after learning that a fire had gutted her classroom and destroyed hundreds of teaching aids she had collected for decades.

Before going to see the damage, Rosenthal asked to see two 12-year-old boys who had admitted setting the fire and were being questioned by police in the principal’s office.

“Let me just look inside before we go to the room,” the third-grade teacher told Principal Jim Owen. “I just want to see if they’re kids I’ve had in my class.”

She peeked wordlessly into the principal’s office and was relieved at what she saw. The boys were not her students.

But that was the only relief Wednesday for Rosenthal, who has taught in the school’s Room 7 for most of her 21 years as an educator.

The school’s 29 other teachers call the classroom “Magic 7” because of the stockpile of special books, dolls and other items Rosenthal kept on hand to illustrate her lessons and to loan out.

Her boxes and bookcases and the classroom’s furniture had been stacked this week on a rug near the back of the room so custodians could wax the floor before the start of school Sept. 9.

The rug is where a burning match landed after the 12-year-olds tossed it through a transom window Tuesday afternoon, school officials said.

The fire smoldered overnight before a nearby homeowner noticed smoke pouring from the classroom at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. Five Los Angeles city Fire Department engine companies extinguished the blaze in about seven minutes.

School officials said the fire did about $20,000 in structural damage. But there was no estimate of Rosenthal’s loss.

Firefighters weren’t in time to save Rosenthal’s 100 teaching posters. Or her 40 Oriental fans, her unusual collection of totem poles, her family of storybook dolls, her puppet stage and assortment of hand puppets, her black history artwork, her statues from foreign lands or her science kits with snakeskins, shells and rocks.

A large selection of story records--some dating back to the childhood of Rosenthal’s 38-year-old son--were melted. Hundreds of books, including out-of-print Dick and Jane readers and storybooks with hand-painted covers, were burned.

Other teachers rushed to comfort Rosenthal, who is the school’s faculty chairman and was the winner two years ago of a local chamber of commerce community award.

“It’s like it happened to me,” said second-grade teacher Colleen Jarvis, a frequent borrower of Rosenthal’s teaching aids.

As they watched school workers shovel debris from the classroom, school district police investigator Richard G. Keith led two more sixth-grade boys into the principal’s office. They had been implicated by the first two youngsters and also admitted their involvement, he said.

“They’re not bad kids,” Keith said. “It’s just one of those things that escalated. They didn’t think of the consequences.”

Keith said the parents of the first two suspects turned the boys in to Owen after they learned from other children that the boys had been seen playing with matches at the school Tuesday. The four boys, who all attend the school, were arrested on suspicion of felony arson and later released to the custody of their parents.

“The boys were in tears when they came in. So were their parents,” Owen said. “The parents are being very cooperative. They are good people. They’ve done a lot for the school in the past.”

School district officials said the four families will be ordered to split the cost of the classroom repairs.

Rosenthal, who lives in Reseda, vowed to rebuild her classroom collection. She said she gathers the materials on trips with her husband, a linguist.

“I like children to see and touch. So I’ll have to have things for them to touch,” she said.

She also said she would like to talk with the students who set the fire.

“My first thought was that we did something wrong, we didn’t reach the children,” she said. “It’s really their own things they destroyed.”