Officials Expect Lots of ‘No-Shows’ When Dade Schools Open Monday : Recovery: With up to 30% of the students and nearly 5,000 teachers and staff displaced by Hurricane Andrew, problems are likely.

As Dade County prepares to open its schoolhouse doors on Monday--two weeks late--there are more questions than answers.

How many children will show up?

How many parents will keep their children home because they have no supplies, no shoes or no decent place to live?

How many migrant families have moved on to other areas in search of work?

Almost three weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit south Dade County like a bombshell, scattering property and lives like dead leaves, the children certainly are visible, many of them. You see them in the tent cities, out riding bicycles on shadeless streets or joylessly playing beside the rubble that used to be their homes.

Whether they will all be in school Monday is another matter.

The hurricane, which wiped out whole communities and blasted much of Miami’s southern suburbs, has left the Dade County School District with a logistics nightmare.

Because the district’s central computer is down, no one knows how many parents, seeking a less tumultuous environment, have enrolled their children in schools in less-devastated parts of the county or in other districts altogether, someplace where the air conditioning works, where soldiers do not stand on every corner and where people still have homes.

Many of the children who show up for school Monday will be suffering trauma from the hurricane and its aftereffects, but no one knows how severe the problems will be or how many children will be affected.

“We’re really on edge about what we’re going to be facing,” said Joseph Jackson, supervisor of psychological services for the Dade County School District. “We’re talking about 20% to 30% of our kids who have been displaced by the hurricane. We anticipate many serious problems with it.”

Not only are thousands of the students newly homeless, but so are an estimated 5,000 teachers and other school staff members. “They’re displaced,” said Jackson, “so they’re facing some major trauma too.”

Many of them, like the pupils, have been living hand-to-mouth in crowded, makeshift conditions. Many school buildings have been used as shelters for the homeless, and some have been set aside specifically for school district employees. Shelter residents have had to find other quarters as the start of school nears.

For Monday, teachers have been asked to be especially sensitive to their pupils’ needs, to watch out for signs of fatigue or stress, even as many of them may be suffering some of the same problems themselves.

The good news is that all but 10 of the district’s 278 schools will be open Monday. Only two schools are considered so heavily damaged that they will have to close permanently, although repair work will be carried out on a number of schools while classes continue.

School Supt. Octavio Visiedo had earlier estimated that 35 schools would be unable to open in time for the start of school. But maintenance crews worked 12-hour shifts, helped out by nearly 1,500 military personnel, to get the schools ready.

The reopening of school suggests at least a tentative return to normalcy for those who live in the devastated area. But don’t believe it: Life at Ground Zero still is in almost incomprehensible disarray.

In the hardest hit areas, the most striking change that has occurred since the hurricane, at least in the way the place looks, is the massive military presence. With 28,000 U.S. troops and National Guardsmen in the area, southern Dade County looks like an occupied, war-torn country.

The soldiers move through a blighted landscape in which tens of thousands of dead trees still fill up yards and fields, and thousands of homes and businesses still look as if they had been caught in bombing raids. Ninety thousand homes are still without electricity. Hundreds of traffic signals throughout the area are malfunctioning or nonexistent.

Sammy Espinoza, who was waiting for a haircut with his small niece and nephew, said many parents are not yet prepared to send their children off to school.

“A lot of the parents have no place to stay,” he said. “They’re packed up four and five families to a house” and often are living miles from their devastated homes. He wondered how the children would get to school. The task of transporting them on buses in such conditions seems daunting.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said.

School officials, however, say that the district plans to send buses to the tent cities and to devastated neighborhoods to pick up children. In addition, students who normally walk to school will be transported to their new schools on shuttle buses if their old school is closed.

Principals throughout the county have been instructed to accept any student, regardless of their official residence and even if they have no school records. All they need is proof of immunization. Classrooms across the county are expected to be more crowded because of transferring south Dade students.

Officials say that more than 7,000 students from the 10 storm-damaged schools that cannot reopen immediately will be absorbed into other schools. To accommodate them, seven schools will hold split sessions and operate from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Before the hurricane, the district had anticipated an enrollment of 312,500. Now officials think it is possible that 10,000 to 15,000 students won’t enroll. They also anticipate that the schools will be slow to fill. That is because so many families are still coping with day-to-day issues of survival.

“Many students have left the county and many others are living hand-to-mouth, and thinking about going to school is going to be very difficult for them,” said Jackson, the school district psychologist.

Noting that many children will be living in tent cities for an indefinite period of time, he said, “Their homes are not even getting cleaned up, let along built back.”

Students began registering for school last week but because of the post-hurricane chaos and a malfunctioning central computer, the district has not been able to calculate where the students are or how many are likely to attend. Each school has been tabulating enrollment by hand.

“We won’t know what the numbers are until school actually opens up on Sept. 14,” said Bailey Stewart, the district’s executive director for student services.

The district began holding workshops Thursday for school counselors, social workers and school psychologists to prepare them to help the anticipated large number of traumatized students. In turn, these personnel will train teachers at their individual schools.

Teachers will use class discussions and special materials, including coloring books that depict life after natural disasters, to get pupils talking.

The school staff has been told to expect many students to be fatigued and bored and that some may exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorders. Students may seem to be coping well at first, “then in a couple of months they will start falling apart,” Jackson said.

The district estimates that perhaps as many as 10% of the children from the hardest hit areas will need additional psychological help.

Stewart said he doubts that much teaching will take place at first. “Children are no different from adults,” he said. “Much of what usually occurs is: ‘How are you doing? What happened to you?’

“You talk about your experiences. We will need to let them get it out of their systems. They’ll need to find out what happened to their friends.”