YUBA CITY, Calif. — Eight-year-old Bella Maloney woke up
next to her little brother in a queen-size bed at a Best Western hotel
and for breakfast ate a bagel and cream cheese that her mother brought
up from the lobby.
And then she was off to school for the first time in nearly a month.
For
Bella, brother Vance and thousands of other youngsters in Northern
California who lost their homes or their classrooms in last month's
deadly wildfire, life crept a little closer to normal Monday when school
finally resumed in most of Butte County.
"They're ready to get back," Bella's mother, Erica Hail,
said of her children. "I think they're sick of Mom and Dad." At school,
"they get to have time alone in their own space and their own grade and
they get to just be by themselves."
Schools in the county
had been closed since Nov. 8, when the blaze swept through the town of
Paradise and surrounding areas, destroying nearly 14,000 homes and
killing at least 88 people in the nation's deadliest wildfire in a
century. About two dozen people remain unaccounted for, down from a
staggering high of 1,300 a few weeks ago.
About
31,000 students in all have been away from school since the disaster.
On Monday, nearly all of them went back, though some of them attended
class in other buildings because their schools were damaged or
destroyed, or inaccessible inside evacuation zones.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/children-return-school-3-weeks-after-california-wildfire-n943296
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