Stress of Hurricane Preys on Children’s Lives : Florida: Elementary students have slit their wrists and tried to hang themselves. No one has died, but many troubled youngsters living with storm’s effects have been pushed to the brink.

One dreams he is being attacked by a swarm of vicious tornadoes. Another’s nightmares feature a giant who shakes his tiny home.

“Last night I dreamed I was fighting Andrew,” said fifth-grader Marc Shwani, 11. “He looked like a big bunch of clouds with eyes.”

But these dreams and other repercussions--the fears of making new friends after so many people have left the area, the trepidation whenever the wind blows--are not the worst juvenile fallout from Hurricane Andrew.

More than half a year since the storm devastated their homes and lives, a shocking number of young children in South Florida are attempting suicide.

“We’ve had a second-grader jump from a second-story building. We have had kids trying to slit their wrists. We’ve had kids putting electrical cords around their necks and trying to string themselves up,” said Joseph L. Jackson, supervisor for psychological services for Dade County schools.

Although no young child has been successful in attempting suicide, Jackson said that more than a dozen Dade elementary schoolchildren have tried to kill themselves in the last two months, compared to one or two last year.

“It’s something we did not anticipate,” he said. “We anticipated a lot of other things. One of the key issues in suicide attempts is that it is a cry for help. Maybe we were missing some clues.”

He said many students are coping well, but “kids who had problems before the storm are having more problems. . . . Kids who were emotionally handicapped before are becoming severely emotionally disturbed.”

Cathy Dallas, a counselor at Southwood Middle School, said there have been two suicide attempts there since the Aug. 24 storm.

“One student told me, as well as his mother, (that) he wished he was dead,” Dallas said. “It was hurricane-related, but there were problems beforehand. It was kind of like the hurricane was the last straw.”

The Clinton Administration is aware that some children are suffering. Henry G. Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, announced during a recent visit to Miami that the Administration would make counseling for these children a priority.

Meanwhile, children who live amid blown-out houses and piles of debris find it hard to escape memories of the storm they survived.

The Naranja school, which includes students from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade, remains in pieces. Trees that lined the walkway are history and the remains of new building still stand. Across the street, structures are abandoned and roofless.

Small wonder that children are obsessed with the whirlwind.

“We hid in the closet and when we got out, all we saw was sky,” said Jessie Piniero, 10, a fourth-grader at Naranja.

“I had a cat, but it got squashed,” said classmate Lizeth Puyana, 10. “I liked my cat, but I lost it.”

Fourth-grader Jerry Edwards tried to talk about his storm experience with a visitor to his elementary school classroom.

“When a lot of wind comes and rain, I think it’s another hurricane,” said Rocio Belmontes, 10, a fourth-grader at Naranja Elementary. “With the last big storm, I couldn’t sleep. I tried, but I couldn’t.”

Yolanda Blanco Wohl, a counselor at Naranja, holds weekly sessions with the students, where they talk about their fears.

“It’s OK to be scared of the storm. I’m an adult and I was scared,” she tells the students.

Some students have shorter attention spans these days and are having trouble concentrating on schoolwork, she said.

“One kid is having seizures,” Wohl said. “We don’t know if it has to do with the hurricane and if it’s stress related, but he wasn’t having these seizures before the storm.”

Jackson, the school district’s chief psychologist, said that almost all of the students’ problems can be traced to home, to “the inability of the parents to deal with the situation . . . they are bringing anxiety into the home.”

Estela Santiago, principal of Redondo Elementary in nearby Homestead, said she has mounted an aggressive program to fend off the post-hurricane blues.

“I don’t have suicides and I don’t have discipline problems,” she said. “We have a strong self-esteem proponent here. I can tell we are coping. I say when we are faced with a crisis, we have two ways to go: We could become desperate or we can tackle it. Our students are taught that strengths come from within.”