The Juan Villegas community was still burning on the afternoon of January 8th. But there was one place he had to reach.
Pasadena Middle School welcomed Vilgas as a 12-year-old from Mexico. It is where he finds his foothold in a strange new country, connects with other Latino immigrants, and makes lifelong friends.
He had heard that the campus had been destroyed, but rumors moved quickly in the first time of the Eton fire. Someone told him that the Superking Market on Lincoln Avenue was on fire, but it turned out to be wrong. Maybe somehow, school was fine.
The road near Elliott has been closed. But Vilgas knew how to go around the closure of Lincoln Avenue. He went through the residential area. There, flames still erupted from the cut gas system of the smoldering house, and ashes rained down from the sky.
He then arrived at Elliott. The impressive bell tower of the school was still standing, almost 100 years ago, but many of the Lake Avenue campuses had been destroyed.
“I was in shock,” Vilgas said. “When I started Elliot, it brought me back. This was my first school here in America and now there are no more places left. And I’ll experience this We were thinking about the number of schools in. We didn’t know how many people we lost.”
Juan Vilgas, lead gardener for the Pasadena Unified School District, helped clean the campus so that it could be reopened after the Eaton fire.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
As a lead gardener for the Pasadena Unified School District, Vilgas soon receives the most important duties of his decades-long career. The race will oversee the cleanup of campus grounds and bring about 14,000 children back into class. Over the past few weeks, Vilgas has found himself, like the thousands of people in his community, overcoming the shock of a disastrous month. His father had just died, his in-laws’ house was burned down, and the school grounds were a hellish scene.
That afternoon, when he incorporated the groundbreaking middle school smoking husks of Pasadena Unification, it was all too much to endure.
“That was when it hit me,” said Vilgas, 49. “I broke down and I started to cry.”
Monumental tasks
Vilgas knows the complexity of all 24 Pasadena Unified Campus. Set on roughly 226 acres of land in Altadena, Sierra Madre and Pasadena, the school offers a diverse population and is among other programs, including education focused on multilinguals, science and arts.
On January 8th, they were all closed.
Five campuses were burned badly. Many survived the fire, but the school had to be cleaned before it resumed. The district said it would not welcome students until its property has been evaluated and confirmed safely by the environmental testing company. “We conducted extensive testing at various locations within the affected school building,” the district assessing Sooth, char and ash said.
Juan Vilgas, the lead gardener of Pasadena Unification, passes the damaged scoreboard at John Muir High School on February 5th.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Eventually, Pasadena unified the schools in stages over two weeks, bringing the final group back to the end of the month. Despite the district’s efforts, some parents told the Times they were unsure that it would be safe for their children to return to class. Pasadena Unification, which released the results of the environmental tests, claims that the campus is safe.
Most of the workers flocking to the school were contracted with Pasadena Unification. However, district maintenance and operational staff, including Vilgas, who oversees five colleagues, were crucial to the planning. Twelve in-house gardeners used chainsaws and rakes to clean fallen trees and large branches, then pressed brooms to clean small debris.
“We all depend on everyone here, especially Juan,” he said in January, as Vilgas and other gardeners worked nearby during his visit to Jackson Elementary School on January 23rd. said Michael Corrales, who visited Jackson Elementary School on the 23rd.
Pasadena Unification contracted workers will clean the classrooms at Jackson Elementary School on January 23rd.
(For Nick Agro/Times)
Their work was more difficult due to the temporary ban on the use of leaf blowers to limit the spread of dangerous microparticles in Pasadena. Standing outside Jackson, Vilgas said he was eager to return to small, everyday moments, including using a leaf blower to turn it off so parents and students could pass.
“We miss it,” he said.
Gardeners who wore N95 masks, goggles and sometimes respiratory devices worked systematically. They will stay at school until it is considered “clear,” Vilgas said.
Then it was on the next campus. This included John Muir High School, another alma mater in Vilgas. The time to clean up his time will give him an opportunity to look back on his journey from Mexico to the United States and consider how his Pasadena unified education helped him.
New kids on campus
Vilgas spent his childhood in Potrero de Galegos, Mexico, a small town about 200 miles north of Guadalajara. In 1987, his parents moved their family to the United States – seven children in total – and settled in Pasadena, where other relatives already lived. Initially he lived with his grandparents on Summit Avenue.
The Villegas still remember their first ride on the highway. “We had two or three cars in town. Everything was different.”
He joined Elliot in sixth grade and was placed in English as a second language class. There were many students there from Mexico and Central American countries. Bilingual Vilgas was able to support his new classmates academically. And this experience helped him find his footing on campus.
Gardener Juan Vilgas went to John Muir High School in the early 1990s.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Eventually, Vilgas moved to Muir High School. It was the early 90s, and friends were the focus. He was a social teenager who “wandered around with bad kids,” he said embarrassingly. It helped Vilgas had a car – the 1983 Ford Fairmont. It was a job ride where he respects its huge trunk and spacious interior, and proved useful when he and his friends cut classes and go to the beach.
Villegas time in Muir has been reduced. When his grandfather suffered a stroke during his fourth grade, he left school to take care of him. Vilgas is still thinking about completing his high school degree.
He needed to find a job, and the brothers helped him set him up as a residential gardener. It was a natural fit – Vilgas always loved working outdoors. Eventually he had 75 clients.
His personal life was also blossoming. Vilgas met Nora Arevalo at Kinseñera in 1995. “She moved in with me three months later,” he said. By the end of the year they were married. Then the kids came: Juan Jr. in 1996, Jorge in 1997, and Angel 10 years later.
Soon the boys had enrolled in Pasadena Unified Elementary School. And all three finally attended Muir. When they dropped them on various campuses, Vilgas said at times he felt the landscaping “sees a little better for the kids.”
Michael Corales, Pasadena Unification’s Maintenance and Operations assistant visited Jackson Elementary School on January 23rd.
(For Nick Agro/Times)
Vilgas was hired by the district in 2003 as a gardener. His older sons marveled at his father’s new gig. “They saw me on the first day they wore uniforms at their school,” he said, “and they wanted to take a picture with me.”
He still remembers hearing them say to their friends: “It’s my father.”
‘Depends on villegas
A month before the fire, Juan’s father, Enrique Vilgas, passed away at the age of 74. His in-laws then burned.
“The whole block they live in has gone,” Vilgas said.
Vilgas took a short vacation in mid-January due to a tendency to have a dad’s service service. And he’s rejoined the reopening race for the district, which is already well on track.
Contract workers will clean classrooms at Jackson Elementary School on January 23rd.
(For Nick Agro/Times)
The gardener had its own responsibility, but Vilgas said he and his crew bound a loose end after the contracted workers left. “We made sure everything was clean. …Whatever they missed, we went back and cleaned it,” he said.
That didn’t surprise Principal Lawton Gray, Muir, who attended school with Vilgas. The principal, who was responsible when asked about the student’s high school days, said the gardener always paid attention to the little things.
“He’ll come here over the weekend and lock the gates if he sees them open,” Gray said. “He was always there for the school and the students.”
Working at Muir on a rainy February morning, Vilgas took a break near a chain link fence where he and his crew had just cut down on the overgrown Orendar. Nearby, pruning from smeared trees was found in the park. He was seen in his elements in green and chainsaw.
Juanville Gas, the Pasadena Unified Lead Gardener, removed the debris from Jackson Elementary School on January 23rd.
(For Nick Agro/Times)
At Muir, which reopened on January 30th, Villegas and his crew cleared the fallen trees, repaired other wind damage, and confirmed that contract workers were cleaning up the interior space. Even after classes resumed, they were still doing preventive maintenance, including removing cumbersome trees.
“To be honest, they’ve never looked this nice,” Vilgas said of the school’s landscaping. “We’ve done more than normal.”
But that wasn’t always easy. Vilgas has saddened most of the past few months. For his father. And his community.
Still, even during his terrible visit to Elliot on January 8th, Vilgas realized something that gave him hope. A giant oak tree – what he said was the subject of complaints that it should be reduced due to its size – survived the fire.
He still can’t inspect the sturdy wood, and we don’t know if it’s burning in flames.
But it is still standing. For now, that’s enough.
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