It took a split second for the instincts of Principal Laura Gutierrez to kick in when an earthquake coursed through Aldama Elementary School in Highland Park as she stood outside supervising recess.
She started to dance — shaking in time to the shaking. A few students, frozen in momentary fear, saw her and started dancing too.
“They looked at me, a lot of them with big eyes. I looked back and it was like, ‘OK, we’re gonna just sway to this.’ And so a lot of them did it with me.”
She then immediately radioed her plant manager and supervision aides to coordinate a full campus response.
A 12:20 p.m. moderate earthquake jolted the first day of school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, causing no reported damage, but bringing on jitters and testing preparedness instilled by earthquake drills.
Centered in El Sereno, the 4.4 magnitude temblor especially rattled nearby, including Wilson High School, which was temporarily evacuated, said Supt. Alberto Carvalho. Students ducked and covered at many campuses, with a smaller number following with a short-term evacuation.
The main campus at Academia Anawakalmekak, a charter school, sits two blocks from the epicenter. The force of the shock was no dancing matter.
“It felt like an ocean liner hit the building,” said Marcos Aguilar, co-head of the K-12 charter school.
The initial jolt was the most of it, with follow-up shaking lasting just a few seconds, Aguilar said.
That’s about how Jose Montes de Oca, the assistant principal at the upper-grades campus, felt it — although he used the word “truck,” not “ocean liner.”
Aguilar was upstairs working with some staff and admits he and colleagues ignored the standard protocol to duck and cover and instead rushed downstairs to check on students.
They were fine — and were following the rules of duck and cover under or near their desks and then evacuating after the shaking stopped under adult supervision. Many if not most of the students already were outside because it was lunch time, said Montes de Oca.
Parents were flooding the phone lines to check on kids — which also happened at other schools, including Aldama. The charter school staff could not initially pick up the calls because they, too, had to evacuate. But the school quickly sent out a text saying everyone was safe.
Aguilar rushed over to the campus for the youngest students “because that’s where I thought there’d be more concern.” About four students were spooked, with one crying. “Everybody else was pretty much just excited to be outside. It did shock a couple of our staff members. They might have past memories of bigger earthquakes.”
At an afternoon school assembly for students and parents — part of the regular first-day events — Montes de Oca reviewed earthquake safety, including what to do at home.
As scary as things were for a few seconds, Aguilar noted that no one evacuated from the restaurant next store.
Back at Aldama, Principal Gutierrez said about two-thirds of students already were outside — either at recess or lunch. The students inside appeared to have followed safety rules. It helped that she’d chosen earthquake safety as the subject of her Monday school assembly. Like the charter school, Aldama has earthquake drills every month.
Parent Lauren Quan-Madrid hadn’t felt the earthquake where she was working in Whittier. But her husband, a teacher at Wilson High, alerted her in something of a panic to check on their daughter.
The shaking had been strong at Wilson, leading to a schoolwide evacuation and a painstaking campus inspection that kept students outside for a while.
Their second-grader, Valeria Madrid-Romo, said the earthquake scared her. She’d already been anxious about going into a new grade at school, wondering if she could handle harder material.
By the end of the day, she felt reassured academically and had moved past the earthquake. When her mother arrived breathlessly and had her pulled momentarily from class, Valeria demanded to know: “What are you doing here?”
Juvenal Rodriguez and his wife were jolted into alarm as well, but Mateo, also a second-grader, was unimpressed. It was much more interesting, he said, when hail fell at their house during the recent rainy season, he said.
Aldama third-grader Madison Alvarez thought the earthquake sounded like a tree falling — so she did not get too concerned. What really stood out to her was that it was the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.
“We did a lot of art and coloring,” she said. “And had the first day of recess, it was short, but it was really fun.”
Jorge Alvarado, a 12th-grader at Academia Avance, a different charter school, was sitting in class when he saw a mirror shake, then he felt the floors vibrate and then saw the walls move.
“I was just in shock because, like, we were in class, and I didn’t expect it to happen,” Jorge said. But as at the other schools, he and his classmates knew what to do.
Principal Gutierrez chose to embrace a positive spin: “We dance for any reason at Aldama.”