Structure taken from students who most need it

Elise Krawchuk heard the news and wished the fire had taken her house instead.

Relentless flames from the deadly Northern California wildfires that destroyed the homes of her friends also leveled the Santa Rosa school that helped her 11-year-old autistic son, Aidan, once distant and unaffectionate, become a “huge cuddler.”

It was the school where Aidan’s classmate, Oliver, 11, who didn’t have a single friend for the first 10 years of his life, finally began to make some. And the school where Valentina, 11, who was suicidal in the third grade, learned social and emotional skills.

The Santa Rosa branch of Anova School, the only educational program for high-functioning students with autism in Sonoma County, was lost to the destructive wildfires that tore through the city.

The school was located at the Luther Burbank Center for Arts near the Fountaingrove area of Santa Rosa, where the fast-moving fire completely destroyed numerous homes and structures on Oct. 8 and 9, including the Anova campus, which served 120 students ranging from age 5 to 22.

“If I had the choice, I would trade my house for that school,” Krawchuk said. “Without even thinking about it.”

Some parents said they spent years fighting various school districts so their autistic children — who are bright but too neurologically different to cope with the social demands of public schools — could find a special environment to thrive.

Now, as school founder Andrew Bailey begins the process of rebuilding, parents are asking themselves what they should do in the meantime. The nearest branch of Anova is some 70 miles away in Concord. They’ve started fundraising for repairs, but need a temporary place to call home.

Karen Kaplan, an autism spectrum disorder consultant in the Bay Area, said there’s no other school in the county with services for students with mild to moderate autism who are on the college-bound track.

The loss is coupled with the fact that children on the spectrum are known to have high anxiety and don’t cope well with change.

“All of a sudden they wake up Monday morning and they’re told,‘There’s no school,’ ” Kaplan said. “To them, you’ve overwhelmed them. Their structure of their daily life is gone. There’s no answer for them.”

Krawchuk, Aidan’s mom, had pushed public school officials to enroll her son in Anova

“She cries every time she goes to bed at night ever since she found out. It’s just devastating because we can’t pick up and go to a different school.” Maya Irving, mother of autistic 11-year-old Valentina, a student at the fire-destroyed Anova School in Santa Rosa

at an individual educational plan meeting, but they preferred to place him in special needs classes, which Krawchuk resisted. Then she was given the choice of placing Aidan in the Anova school on a 30-day trial that turned into a permanent stay.

Aidan is prone to jumping up and down, flapping his arms, wringing his hands and talking to himself. But he can also look at just about any snake and tell you where it comes from, what type of poison it has and how it could kill you, Krawchuk said.

“It literally scares me. All the fighting we did to get him in there,” Krawchuk said. “I’m trying not to panic, but at the same time it’s a huge fear.”

Maya Irving, the mother of Valentina, said her daughter couldn’t read properly before starting Anova in 2015.

In a regular classroom setting, she was a wallflower who was so quiet she never posed behavioral concerns. But she had scabs over her arms from incessant scratching and intense migraines from stress. Irving credits the school and doctors from UCSF with saving her daughter from suicidal ideation.

Now in a specialized environment, Valentina “reads like nobody’s business.”

When Irving asked her daughter what Anova meant, Valentina replied, “no bullying” and “I feel very safe there.”

“She cries every time she goes to bed at night ever since she found out” about the fire, Irving said. “It’s just devastating because we can’t pick up and go to a different school.”

Kathleen O’Brien, Oliver’s mom, said social mishaps in her son’s first four years of schooling gave him post-traumatic stress disorder. Even when he started at Anova, he’d cry throughout the day and refuse to do work.

“He hated school,” O’Brien said Monday. “School was just such a place of trauma and shame and failure.”

But Oliver — who still doesn’t like school too much — became more “centered,” in his two years at Anova, and made the first friends of his life.

“He has made tremendous progress. He’s learned tools there. He’s been given an opportunity there to experience success; to feel good about himself,” O’Brien said. “There’s nothing else that exists like this that can serve these kids and prevent them from suffering all day every day at school.