Tiffanie Lambert, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the Phoenix-Talent School District, is doing her dissertation on fire survivors at Phoenix Elementary. The school had the highest percentage of students who lost their homes during the 2020 Almeda Fire. 

The Almeda Fire of Sept. 8, 2020, that began in northwest Ashland and ended near south Medford, eliminating about 2,500 homes in between, ripped right through the Phoenix-Talent School District.

Across five schools, the fire displaced 798 students from 484 families, according to district figures. The school with the highest percentage of students who lost their homes was Phoenix Elementary.

Three years later, scores of district students — though likely under 100 — still don’t have permanent housing because of the fire’s impact, according to Tiffanie Lambert, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.

The district could not give an exact total — and in fact the number of Almeda survivors who remain without permanent housing is difficult to nail down.

ACCESS, Jackson County’s community action agency, has roughly 200 households of fire survivors — individuals, couples and families who went through the Almeda and South Obenchain fires — living in transitional housing that includes The Jackson and The Loring in Medford and the Gateway Project in Talent, according to Melanie Doshier, the agency’s support services director.

For students, 2020 was a time of compounding traumas.

The coronavirus pandemic had already disrupted their academic lives, as schools resorted to distance learning to minimize the spread of COVID-19. This situation was especially hard for students suddenly unhoused and living temporarily at The Expo or in a hotel room, or doubled up at the homes of friends or relatives.

“There was a family I met that had 19 people living in a very small home,” said Lambert, who is doing her dissertation through Portland State University on fire survivors at Phoenix Elementary.

A lot of child care disappeared with the fire. Big kids found themselves caring for little kids.

“Our older students kind of sacrificed their own education to make sure their younger siblings were taken care of,” Lambert said.

The school district continued to graduate students on time. The senior class of 2021 had an overall graduation rate of 93%, “10 points better than the state average,” according to the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators. The coalition, along with the Oregon Association of Central Office Administrators, gave Lambert the 2023 Achievement of Excellence Award for her work keeping students on track and plugged into their schooling.

But Phoenix-Talent continues to lose enrollments, especially in its elementary schools, as families find stable housing outside the school district.

“We did see dramatic decreases in our enrollment immediately after the fire, and we just didn’t recoup that,” Lambert said.

In September 2020, before Almeda, Phoenix-Talent Schools had 2,578 students enrolled. By mid-April 2023, that number had dropped to 2,190, according to Joe Zavala, a communications specialist at the school district.

The district’s major concern now: Students who lost their homes in the fire are academically progressing at less than a third of the rate in reading and math as are their peers who didn’t lose theirs. This is especially true for elementary and middle school students.

“We would hope that in a few years they’d be catching back up, but they’re not,” Lambert said. “They lost a lot of skills in that way, and they’re still dealing with trauma today.”

She is hopeful that, with family supports, they will get there, Lambert said.

The Rogue Valley Times will publish stories all this week looking back at various aspects of the Almeda Fire, of Sept. 8, 2020, including stories from survivors reliving the experience.