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Los Angeles Scrambles to Relocate Porter Ranch Students

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Porter Ranch residents hold a press conference after a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting last November. (Maya Sugarman/KPCC)

Los Angeles Unified School District officials say nearly every division in the district has worked the last three weeks to relocate nearly 2,000 students in the north San Fernando Valley because of the nearby ongoing natural gas leak.

Everything is supposed to be ready on Tuesday, the relocated students' first day of school.

"The most difficult piece is that we had hundreds of individuals working day and night for the period of three weeks,” said L.A. Unified area superintendent Vivian Ekchian, “in order to create the most desirable environment possible for the large number of students that would be relocated in a short period of time."

The school district has moved Porter Ranch students' desks, textbooks and teachers to 65 bungalows at Northridge Middle School and Sunny Brae Avenue Elementary School. The students will be grouped with others from their same classes. The schools are about 7 miles away from the students' original campuses.

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Ekchian said she wants the teaching to be seamless and “for the students to find comfort in that they are in an environment where the conversation isn’t about what they're smelling or which direction the wind is blowing or possibly how they're suffering from a headache, but don't know if it is from the gas odor or if it's something else."

Read the full story via KPCC

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