For N.Y. Students, It’s a Time of Grieving : Tragedy: A special room is set up to help youths cope with the fatal shooting of a classmate at a Brooklyn high school.

A student gave Principal Carol A. Beck a small cake Tuesday with a single red rose and the words “cheer up” written on the white icing. Another drew a poster with a gray gun shooting red smoke and the word “tragedy.” A local merchant dropped by with $100 in a pink envelope to help pay funeral expenses.

And in a special room set aside for grieving at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn--the scene Monday of the first killing in a New York City school in more than a decade--Jermaine Henderson, 17, kept reliving the moments he spent kneeling alongside his friend, 16-year-old Darryl Sharpe.

“He kept saying, ‘Get me up.’ The more he talked, he kept losing his voice,” Henderson said. “He pointed toward his chest. I unbuttoned his collar. There was a hole in his neck.”

Henderson himself carries a bullet in his head and another in his shoulder from random street violence. He paused. “If he stepped the other way, that could have been me in the newspaper today.”

“A bullet has got no name,” said another student seated next to Henderson, who also witnessed Monday’s shooting, during which a teacher also was seriously wounded. “It could have hit anybody.”

The bullet that struck Sharpe, a popular ninth-grader with an outstanding attendance record, severed a neck artery. He died at a local hospital. The bullet that hit the teacher, Robert Anderson, 48, a computer instructor, narrowly missed a neck artery.

A 14-year-old student has been charged in the slaying. Detectives said Sharpe was a bystander when the shooting began, the outgrowth of a longtime grudge that exploded into hallway violence. Anderson was wounded trying to break up the dispute.

In the New York City public school system, Thomas Jefferson is a special high school--a monument both to educational progress and extraordinary inner-city danger. The four-story red brick school stands in the East New York section of Brooklyn in a police precinct that recorded 109 homicides and 550 shootings last year, numbers higher than many large cities.

In the last four years, some 30 Jefferson students have died, most of them slain in street violence. These stark statistics prompted Beck to set up the grieving room so tragedy could be ventilated.

Hours after Sharpe’s death, Beck called a special assembly.

“I told the students it is important for you to understand your character is defined in how you handle adversity,” she lectured.

The principal, who in the four years of her tenure has succeeded in raising academic standards so 80% of Jefferson’s graduating seniors now enter college, spoke to the grieving students in very plain language.

“I told them we are all going to be judged on how we handle this drastic situation,” she said. “If they acted like wild animals and clowns and mindless morons, that is what people will see.”

Decorum generally prevailed on Tuesday. The entire teaching staff reported for work, along with a cadre of retired teachers and guidance counselors who volunteered their services.

The principal constantly hiked Jefferson’s hallways, consoling students and teachers. She dispatched relays of parents to Sharpe’s mother’s home to offer condolences and help plan funeral arrangements. She prepared to visit the home of the youth charged in the killing. She organized visits of staff members to Brookdale Hospital where Anderson remained in serious condition.

She put an arm around Joyce Watson, Sharpe’s homeroom teacher, who accidentally started to read his name when she called the roll Tuesday. Some pupils in the classroom began to cry. Watson showed Beck a condolence card students were signing for Sharpe’s family.

A girl, looking downcast, walked by. “Hi, darling. I’m proud of you,” Beck said, trying to cheer her up. A boy wearing a red baseball hat indoors appeared. “Hi, sweetheart, your hat is bothering me,” the principal said. The student took off the hat and walked down the corridor to class.

But it was in the grieving room that the senselessness of the slaying was stark for all to see.

“I heard three shots. Darryl fell on me,” Henderson recalled, fighting back tears. “I saw Mr. Anderson crawling toward the door . . . . I checked myself to see if I got shot. I was shaking.

“If they had just left it alone,” he said, referring to the grudge fight that led to his friend’s accidental death. “He would have been here today.”