Classroom building complete, but more to come at fire-damaged Cardinal Newman High School

After her classroom burned up in the Tubbs fire two years ago, Cardinal Newman High School teacher Alice Meyer started documenting the aftermath.

Using the Marco Polo video app, Meyer, a U.S. history teacher, keeps friends on the East Coast and in Oregon abreast of the rebuilding progress via a group chat.

The videos have gotten more positive since the Tubbs fire struck in October 2017, charring 20 classrooms, the school’s library and the front office - altogether about $15 million in damage to the Catholic campus.

Students and teachers walked into a new north classroom building Aug. 14, marking a return to permanence for some who have been at different locations or in on-campus portable classrooms the past two years.

“It’s exciting and really hopeful, especially when the weather is beautiful,” Meyer said Thursday from inside her new classroom in the building completed before the start of this school year.

Students and teachers used terms like “bright,” and “spacious” to describe the eight classrooms in 10,000 square feet of space. The $4.25 million building on the Larkfield campus north of Santa Rosa lacks only a bit of landscaping.

The classroom building is the most significant completed project to date at Cardinal Newman, and it marks a rebuilding milestone for the school’s community, including hundreds of students who endured multiple moves in the scramble following the fires.

The fire traced an odd path through the campus, leaving untouched a similar classroom building just 15 feet away. Banks of lockers and outdoor seating areas near the building were also spared. But temporary fencing outlined leveled rubble, echoes of what once stood.

In Meyer’s campus ministry class, 16-year-old junior Flora Castaneda said she felt safe coming to school. She talked of shared pain that brought classmates closer together.

She and her fellow juniors - freshmen at the time of the fire - had to take classes at Resurrection Parish in Santa Rosa before coming back to portable classrooms in late January 2018. When she first came back, she was nervous seeing so much change, including the new portable classrooms.

“But being part of going through it and growing in my education while also getting to see the school grow and rebuild to me makes my high school experience more personal and more intimate,” Flora said.

It was special, too, for Quattrocchi Kwok Architects’ Mark Quattrocchi and John Dybczak, the latter having watched his children graduate from the school in 2011 and 2015.

“Like a phoenix, to see it rise from the ashes makes it rewarding,” he said.

World history teacher Dave Geoffrion said he thinks the students have enjoyed being back in a permanent classroom space. Geoffrion alluded to the sense of momentum, too, pointing to rising neighborhoods all around the Cardinal Newman campus.

“It’s just vitality - there’s life again,” Geoffrion said. “To see the amount of construction going on and people coming back to the area, it’s great. I think the kids probably pick up on that as well.”

The school’s chaplain blessed each classroom at the beginning of the school year. Last Friday, parents were invited back for dinner and a short tour.

The building, in the same footprint as its predecessor, has larger windows, and the desks and chairs have wheels to better facilitate group projects. It has huge TV monitors and technology and everything else that makes architects like Quattrocchi call this a “21st-century” classroom building. But it’s also just Step 1.

“This was tremendous; this has given us a lot of excitement, and there’s just more to come,” Cardinal Newman President Laura Held, her tone cryptic and her smile cunning.

Quattrocchi offered a hint in a phone interview Thursday, saying if anything good came out of the fire and its path of destruction through the 1960s-era campus, it was the chance to reset a long-term master plan for the school. It’s a chance, Quattrocchi said, to slowly build the campus to solve some systemic problems with school layout.

Held said the community ought to look forward to Oct. 7, nearly two years to the day from when the Tubbs fire struck.

“We will get more excited about doing a more serious celebration as we move forward in our plans,” Held said.

You can reach Staff Writer Tyler Silvy at 707-526-8667 or tyler.silvy@pressdemocrat.com.