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One windy morning in December 2024, teachers at Orange Vista High School rushed students into a line that stretched to the street. Southern California Edison had cut the power for parts of Riverside County to prevent its equipment from sparking a fire.
Lessons ended. Classrooms went dark. And anxious parents in the Inland Empire city of Perris waited impatiently to greet their children. A month later, the school lost power again, days after the Eaton and Palisades fires to the northwest destroyed entire Los Angeles County neighborhoods.
Orange Vista High was among at least five Riverside County school districts that reported closures during winter high winds in 2024 and 2025. Local school officials say the disruptions hit harder in economically disadvantaged districts, where families rely on critical services such as free meals and child care.
Since 2012, the California Public Utilities Commission has authorized investor-owned utilities such as Edison to cut power during severe weather events to lower the risk of wildfires. The commission reviews every outage. Utilities may pay penalties – as Edison did in this case – if they don’t notify ratepayers properly, or meet other standards.
Edison says shutoffs are necessary to save lives and protect communities. “Our mission really is to keep the power on when it is safe to do so,” said spokesperson Jeff Monford.
After the power shutoffs, the Val Verde Unified School District redirected $500,000 from the school facilities budget to buy battery storage units that could help Orange Vista High keep the lights on during future outages. But Garrick Owen, the district’s assistant superintendent, said the money would be better spent fixing the grid itself.
“If I had a magic wand, would I spend all the money to harden our schools against power outages, or would I spend it to harden the actual infrastructure of the power lines to not have the power outages?” he said.
As climate change drives more extreme weather and more blackouts across California, the cost of adaptation is a growing bill schools say they can’t pay alone.
Low-income students lose out on services
Because state funding to schools is based in part on student attendance, emergency events like power outages bring a financial risk. When a school closes for the day, or when attendance drops, that cuts into attendance numbers. Schools then can file a waiver request with the state Department of Education to protect their funding.
That’s what happened at public schools throughout Riverside County during the 2024-25 school year, when smoke from nearby fires and high winds created problems.
Eight school districts confirmed to CalMatters that they filed waiver requests with the state Department of Education in December 2024 and January 2025. Three districts – Nuview Union, Perris Elementary and Perris Union High – reported closures for at least one day each. Three more – Banning Unified, Beaumont Unified and Jurupa Unified – reported material decreases in attendance on high wind days. Two districts, San Jacinto Unified and Val Verde, reported both closures and low attendance days.
According to the Val Verde district, three schools there lost a total of 13 days of instruction because of the wind events. That’s more than other Riverside County schools that confirmed filing waiver requests to CalMatters. Val Verde schools also reported lower attendance in September 2024, when smoke from the Bridge, Line and Airport fires spread to the region.
After one chaotic day in December, Orange Vista High principal LaKrecia Graham said school administrators bought floodlights to help keep classes in session in case the power went out again. But when the next outage happened, so many worried parents picked up their children that the district decided to close anyway.
“It disrupts a lot of things and it puts people in a panic that I don’t think is necessary,” Graham said. “And that’s what’s gonna keep happening.”
The lack of power isn’t just an inconvenience. It can pose a safety risk for students, said Catalina Chrest, principal of Skyview Elementary School, also in Perris. Children may hurt themselves navigating dark rooms, or they can lose access to essential needs like water, heaters and air conditioning.
Schools serve as community hubs. For low-income families and students with disabilities, losing access to them means more than a missed day of learning — it means losing child supervision, free meals and critical support services.
The meal they eat at school “might be one of their most nutritious meals of the day,” Chrest said.
In the Perris Elementary School District, more than 90% of students are low-income. At Skyview Academy and Clearwater Elementary School, wind whistling through buildings made classrooms frigid. Bathrooms went completely dark. Parents told school staff that their food was spoiling at home.
The outages “impact our families greater than families in a more affluent neighborhood,” said Perris Elementary School District superintendent Bruce Bivins.
Utilities weigh harms and benefits
When investor-owned utilities decide to turn the power off, the California Public Utilities Commission requires that they balance the potential harms against the benefits. Utilities regulated by the CPUC also must give notice before shutoffs and offer resources to make the outage easier on residents and schools.
In Riverside County, school officials and teachers said delayed notice during the winter wind events made it difficult to prepare for the shutoffs. At Orange Vista High, Graham said the school received notice of a potential outage at a certain time, but it came earlier, so staff was unprepared.
Paula Ford, assistant superintendent of business services at Jurupa Unified School District, said “actually, we would receive a notice that the power was down maybe an hour after the power was already down.”
After the January shutoffs that darkened Riverside County schools, the CPUC fined Southern California Edison $7.8 million for violating notification requirements. Terrie Prosper, a CPUC spokesperson, says the commission is still investigating Edison’s handling of the December shutoffs.
She added the utilities commission is closely monitoring Edison’s work to reduce power shutoffs.
“We understand that PSPS events can be disruptive for schools,” she said. “However, these actions are taken out of serious wildfire concerns. California has experienced devastating wildfires in recent years that have destroyed communities, closed schools for extended periods, and placed lives at risk.”
Southern California Edison did not comment on the penalty.
Edison spokesperson Monford said that, when possible, notifications for public safety power shutoffs take place three days in advance.
“In some instances, we are unable to send advanced notifications due to emergent weather,” Monford said. “This was especially the case last winter, when we had extraordinarily new wind events.”
Monford added the utility offers assistance to help schools become more resilient to the power outages. But not all schools benefit from the help.
The utility lends power generators to schools most affected by the power outages. He added the utility hopes to expand the program to lend battery storage systems. Edison also invited some districts, including the Jurupa Unified School District and San Jacinto School District, to daily emergency coordination calls, Monford said.
Critics said the outages may end up causing more harm than the events they’re responding to.
“They put a lot of time and effort and money, which I do not begrudge at all, into the analytics of fire risk to calculate the risk of a wildfire actually starting in certain weather conditions,” said Melissa Kasnitz, legal director for the Center for Accessible Technology. “What they have not done is put any fraction of effort into evaluating the risk of what happens when you turn people’s power off.”
In response, Edison directed CalMatters to tools it uses to analyze shutoff risks, and to reports the utility has filed with regulators after incidents.
Power outages bring a financial toll
School administrators say it’s unfair for districts to carry the financial burden of a problem they didn’t create. They also have to contend with a state education system that financially punishes districts for low attendance that results from emergencies out of their control.
Districts with fewer resources like Perris Elementary School District can’t afford generators and have to prioritize other needs.
Bivins said the district looked into backup power but couldn’t afford generators or battery storage. The district is smaller – serving only elementary students – so it obtains less funding than Val Verde Unified or other unified districts. Schools serving more low-income students also tend to see lower attendance rates, he said, meaning even less money coming in.
With so many urgent needs competing for limited dollars, a generator that might only be used a few times a year doesn’t make the cut.
“That could be better security on our campuses, more modernized facilities, better access to technology, or other things they can actually utilize right now versus the preparation for the possible one day this year (the power goes out),” Bivins said.
But even schools that can afford generators face hidden costs from the outages.
In nearby Jurupa Valley, Peralta Elementary School was able to keep its doors open, the lights on and the heating and cooling systems running.
The Jurupa Unified School District spent more than $364,000 on two generators – each capable of powering an elementary school – and is investing in infrastructure upgrades to make deploying them easier, Ford said.
Because Peralta Elementary is in a high fire risk area surrounded by brush, Southern California Edison also loaned the school another generator through its pilot program. So far this year, the school hasn’t needed to use it.
Still, the outages take a financial toll. Even if schools are open, some parents keep children home – costing the district attendance-based funding.
“Because we stayed open … we’re actually impacted more heavily than schools that close,” Ford said.
To obtain a waiver from the state to protect funding from an emergency, schools have to submit paperwork signed by the school board and county superintendent explaining what happened, and certify they have a plan to keep students learning during the disruption. But the process is uncertain: Schools don’t know how much funding they’ll keep until the state reviews the waiver request and runs its own numbers. Ford said that more leniency on the conditions necessary to qualify for a waiver could help schools during emergency events.
Bivins, the Perris Elementary Unified superintendent, said the state should fund schools based on enrollment, not attendance, so that emergencies don’t threaten budgets.
Michelle Hatfield, a spokesperson for the state Department of Education, said any changes to rules for how schools handle planned outages – and any proposals to fund schools by enrollment rather than by attendance – would require legislation.
Even districts investing in backup power say they can’t fully close the gap on their own.
At Orange Vista High School, newly installed battery storage units will help keep the lights on during the next planned outage. It’s all the Val Verde Unified District could do, said Owen, the assistant superintendent.
But the battery storage systems don’t really solve the broader problem. If a blackout happens at multiple schools over multiple days, “we don’t have a plan for that,” he said.
Equipping every school in the district with generators would probably cost millions. “It’s one of those numbers I don’t need to know, because there’s not gonna be that funding,” Owen said.
Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett contributed reporting.
