School Gets Into Spirit of Evacuation

Monday was supposed to be Spirit Day at Oakridge Tustin Private School, with football, volleyball and a pep rally all on the day’s agenda.

Instead, it became Evacuation Day for the school tucked in the hills below Lemon Heights, with students and faculty scrambling aboard buses as smoke and flames rolled toward their campus.

“I heard explosions, opened up the back door of my classroom and saw the fire across the playground,” said Sue Casagrande, a teacher and administrator who helped lead the decampment to Tustin High School, where Red Cross officials had set up an evacuation center.

Casagrande started the morning teaching a sixth-grade English class. But she wound up spending much of the day sitting on the bleachers of the Tustin High gym with 220 of her school’s students, 20 teachers and an assortment of evacuated classroom pets, including two rabbits, a guinea pig, a rat and a turtle.

Flames never reached Oakridge Tustin, a kindergarten through eighth-grade school, and by mid-afternoon most of the students had been picked up by their parents. But students and teachers alike said they would remember Monday as the day all of those practice fire drills were finally put to the test.

“We’ll go around to each classroom tomorrow and tell the students how proud we are of them,” Principal Patricia Burry said.

As it turned out, Oakridge Tustin provided the only action the evacuation center would see. Red Cross officials braced for the worst. They set up rows of cots, laid out tables of food donated by nearby fast-food restaurants and grocery stores, and fielded dozens of telephone calls from would-be donors as well as some shaken area residents.

Tustin High, like the rest of the Tustin Unified School District, was not in session on Monday because of a previously scheduled staff development day.

Despite the Red Cross preparations, the gymnasium never became the scene of agony and anguish that Dana Hills High School was three years ago during the Laguna Beach fire. After that blaze, hundreds of displaced residents flocked to Dana Hills in search of shelter, missing loved ones and news on the fate of their homes.

“This is far less intense,” said Ron Kinum, a Red Cross volunteer at the Tustin High center who also volunteered during the Laguna fire. The people flooding into shelters following that terrible blaze “looked sort of dazed,” Kinum recalled. “There was such a maelstrom in Laguna. It was really traumatic.”

Monday was traumatic enough for many parents who rushed to Tustin High to pick up their children.

“My heart dropped for a second,” said Rhonda Winfield, describing her reaction the moment she learned of the evacuation at Oakridge Tustin, where her 9-year-old son, Kyle, is a student.

By the time Winfield learned of the evacuation, Kyle was running and sliding across the Tustin High gym floor, playing with his classmates. In fact, the only one ever in any danger at Oakridge Tustin Private School was a pet tarantula that, unlike the rabbits and guinea pig, was left behind in a cage in one of the classrooms.

“We forgot him,” Burry said. “But he’s fine, I’m sure.”

The center closed Monday evening, but the Red Cross planned to open a service center this morning at Church on Red Hill, 13841 Red Hill Ave. Victims are eligible for food, clothing and lodging vouchers.

For more information, call the Red Cross at (714) 835-5381.