Anova school for students with autism thrives despite losing campus to Tubbs fire

Just out of view of Highway 101, a large hole behind Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center for the Arts is cordoned off ? by a chain-link fence. Until Tubbs fire came barreling down the ridge in the early hours of Oct. 9, this was the site of Anova, a school for children and young adults with high-functioning autism.

The school’s co-founder and CEO, Andrew Bailey, pointed to the burned-out hole where the campus used to be, on the east end of the arts center. The hulk of the building and melted furniture still stood in the lot until April, a solemn reminder for students and teachers who lived through the heartache of losing what was to many an educational and emotional anchor.

In spite of the devastating loss of its campus, which serves 135 students from San Francisco to Mendocino County, the Anova Center for Education managed to hold onto its mantra of empowerment and strength in the wake of the October wildfires, which also laid waste to the nearby Fountaingrove and Coffey Park neighborhoods.

“There was never talk of this is it, or we won’t be able to recover from this - we just lost everything,” Bailey said. “Everyone on this team, from the people that work with the kids to the people in our business office to our board of directors, just said, ‘you know what, we have no choice.’”

The Anova team rallied almost instantly to identify a site where they could continue to offer their tailored educational model to the students and parents who had come to rely on it. Three days after the fire burned through the school, the school held a meeting for parents, some who had still not returned to their homes.

“One of the moms came up to me and she said, ‘I would rather have lost my home than lost the school,’?” Bailey recalled. “That is one of the reasons why it was so important for us to get back, because this is these kids’ school. If they can’t come here, they can’t just go back to where they were.”

Many of Anova’s students came to the school after enduring hardship at a public or private school, Bailey said. Students with autism often face challenges in a regular school environment, ranging from overstimulation to social and behavioral issues. All of these factors can affect a child’s ability to learn and grow, Bailey said.

Bailey, who lives in Healdsburg, set to work securing temporary space for the school until they could engineer a more long-term solution. Middle and high school students moved to the Healdsburg Community Center, while the younger students occupied the former Merryhill Country School in Bennett Valley, a community that lost more than 100 homes to the October fires.

“For them to reach out to us when they were still dealing with their maintenance crews fixing up spaces and cleaning up debris, that was really pretty remarkable,” Bailey said.

Classes for the school’s adult transition program were at its administrative offices on Airport Boulevard in Santa Rosa.

Meanwhile, Anova negotiated a lease of the parking lot area behind the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, directly adjacent to their former building. Donations poured in from several regional and statewide businesses, including PG&E, and from a GoFundMe account set up for the school, allowing it to install some portable classrooms in the parking lot.

Challenges abounded during construction. Anova lost in the fire more than 15 years’ worth of furniture, textbooks, computers and instructional aids. It all needed to be catalogued, claimed through insurance and replaced in the three months it took to install the portables.

On Feb. 9, students returned to the Luther Burbank Center site to “wonderful and heartwarming” fanfare, said Juliana LeRoy, whose son, Thomas, is in the 11th grade.

He started at Anova 10 years ago after struggling to adapt in a special-needs program at a local public school.

“The staff at Anova is second to none,” LeRoy said. “When the kids were going to be moving to the different campuses, we got basically a letter from the teacher with pictures of the various settings in the room. They had even reproduced some of the posters that had been in the classroom to make it as familiar as possible for the kids.”

Thomas is adjusting well to the new campus, LeRoy said, though she’s noticed her son watching his favorite movies and doing repetitive behaviors more often than usual. “I think that’s his comfort mechanism,” she said.

LeRoy said she’d eventually like to see the original campus rebuilt.

“It would be really nice to be able to have a facility all back in a cohesive setting,” LeRoy said.

The Luther Burbank Center is meeting with school officials once a week to discuss the center’s plans moving forward, Bailey said. They’d ultimately like to continue leasing space from the center, though the future is less than certain.

“We’re still in a bit of a limbo state for now,” Bailey said. “We have a lease and that goes for years, but it remains to be seen whether this is going to be a long-term solution for us or not.”

School officials plan to stay at the site for at least through this school year, which started Aug. 15.

“We love being here and if there’s a way we can figure out something that works for both us and the Luther Burbank Center then we’ll stay here,” Bailey said.

“If not,” he added, “we’ll be thinking about evolving to another space or looking at a capital campaign perhaps to build our own school.”