War Is First Lesson at City School : Classroom: Students focus on grim events in the gulf and share fears and hopes.

As soon as teacher Mike Romero entered his classroom at Ninth Street School on Thursday morning, it started.

“Mr. Romero, they said one died!”

“Mr. Romero, we’re doing so good!”

On the day after the bombing of Iraq began, there was a buzz in the air even here, at an elementary school off Skid Row. And in Room 14, talking about the war was the first order of business.

The teacher had no ponderous objectives on this morning. He said he just wanted to “let the kids raise their hands and let me know what they’re thinking.”

That sometimes is an arresting exercise in this tough downtown neighborhood, where the lessons of life are often hard and violence never seems far away.

The class quickly dispensed with the morning routines--reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a few minutes of calisthenics to unjangle the nerves.

Then Romero, 28, focused his 24 fifth- and sixth-graders on the grim events taking place a continent away.

Some of his questions elicited immediate answers, gleaned from the morning’s television news shows.

What happened? The United States had mounted a surprise attack. What got bombed? Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. Have there been casualties? An American jet had been shot down, its pilot was dead.

Then came a rush of statements from the students, some reflecting fears, others suggesting wishes.

A girl with her long brown hair pulled into a ponytail said a man who might have been an Iraqi terrorist tried to kill someone near her apartment.

A boy in a blue Ghostbusters T-shirt said he had caught a glimpse on television of classmate Taron Hayden’s brother, Russell, who is serving in the Navy in the Persian Gulf.

Other students excitedly told of seeing the name of their pen pal, who is an Air Force pilot, flash on their television screens at home.

Another boy volunteered that he had heard the rap artist Ice-T talking against the war--apparently, an impressive fact.

Then, turning to the students who had relatives serving in the Persian Gulf, Romero asked how they were feeling, now that war had started.

Taron, 10, buried his face in the crook of his arm, and then carefully chose his words. “I feel disappointed,” he said.

Dawn Hollins, 12, said that her mother already had written a letter to the Navy to find out if her brother was OK. The girl offered nothing more.

Later that morning, in the journal that Romero has each student keep, Dawn wrote: “My brother is scared. I know he is and I am, too. I never wanted him to go to the Red Sea.”

The journals, which Romero reads periodically, are filled with the youngsters’ private thoughts. They tell of football games watched, Christmas presents received and other lighthearted moments.

Other entries record darker realities--of fires that threatened their tenement homes, dope deals they observed, shootings, knifings and child molestations.

Dawn, who lives in a downtown hotel, said to a visitor later that the war does not seem real to her. “It’s like the movies. It seems fake,” she said.

What is more real to her is the violence she said she has witnessed in the streets around the downtown hotel she lives in.

“I seen people get shot. In the middle of the street,” she said, turning suddenly more animated. In downtown, there are “a lot of gangsters and rapes. Sometimes people get killed right in my face. It’s bad down here.”

Romero, who often drives youngsters home from school, acknowledges the ugliness that sometimes seems to engulf their young lives. Most have only one parent living at home, he said. The parents may be unemployed, or they work such long hours that they have little opportunity to become involved in their children’s school. A few of his students are mentally gifted, he adds, but many others have learning problems.

The majority of his students are immigrants from Central American countries. Some of these, like 11-year-old Carmen Gutierrez from El Salvador, have seen war firsthand. Their experiences, though, have made them stronger beyond their years, maturing them in ways their counterparts in other parts of the city could not understand.

“The war is very important,” wrote 11-year-old Tenika Clark, “because every day there (could be) someone dead laying down on the ground. . . . We all have chances of dying. I pray to the Lord that nothing will go wrong.”