Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Simi, Fillmore Schools Closed as Damage Is Assessed : Education: Campuses in the Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Oak Park and Ocean View districts are scheduled to reopen to students today.

All Simi Valley and Fillmore schools will remain closed to students this morning as officials continue to clean up and assess damage from Monday’s temblor, district workers said Tuesday.

Schools in the Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Oak Park and Ocean View districts, which also were closed Tuesday, are scheduled to reopen to students today. Officials in those districts said inspections showed that their schools suffered no major damage.

At schools that were open Tuesday, many teachers spent the first part of the day discussing the earthquake with their students to calm the children’s fears.

In Fillmore, one of the cities hardest hit by the earthquake, district officials said their schools are structurally sound and will reopen Thursday after further cleanup. But in Simi Valley, officials said that only 14 of the district’s 27 schools are sure to reopen then.

Saying they may need more time to inspect the other 13 sites, Simi Valley officials said they will know by this afternoon the complete list of the schools that will open Thursday.

School officials were particularly concerned about three schools on the east side that may have suffered serious structural damage: Simi Valley High, Valley View Junior High and Township Elementary.

“It could have been a lot worse, but of course it’s devastating,” said Kathryn Scroggin, principal at Simi Valley High, where cracks and fallen plaster were visible outside the gymnasium, multipurpose building and library.

Scroggin and other school officials are preparing for the worst: the possibility that Monday’s earthquake caused so much damage that the 30-year-old high school campus and the other two schools will be closed indefinitely.

School officials Tuesday were considering all options, including setting a staggered schedule at Royal and Apollo high schools so Simi Valley High’s 2,100 students could attend classes on those campuses.

Similar plans might have to be developed for other schools, officials said.

“We probably will have short-term and long-term plans,” Simi Valley Supt. Mary Beth Wolford said. “Right now, our goal is to get students back to school as quickly as possible, whether we double up or however we have to do it.”

Except for Fillmore and Simi Valley, all other school districts that were closed Tuesday were scheduled to reopen today, including the Conejo Valley, Moorpark, Oak Park and Ocean View Elementary districts.

At many schools that were open Tuesday, school officials reported that hundreds of parents were keeping their children home following the quake.

In the 12,000-student Oxnard Elementary School District, the absentee rate was 60% higher than normal, and in Ventura the number of students absent from some schools was three times higher than usual.

For many of the children who did go to school, the first assignment Tuesday was to dart under their desks in earthquake drills.

School officials said they hoped the drills would instill confidence in the children.

“We wanted the teachers to do their drop drills and fire drills to reinforce to the children that there is something they can do to protect themselves when an earthquake hits,” said Bernard Korenstein, assistant superintendent of the Oxnard Elementary School District.

After the drills, the next assignment in many classrooms was for the children to talk about where they were, what they were doing and how they felt during Monday’s temblor.

Teachers in Ojai said their students couldn’t stop talking about the earthquake.

“The kids were asking each other, ‘Did you feel it? Did you feel it!’ ” said Suzanne Lovelady, who teaches a combined second- and third-grade class at San Antonio School. “They wanted to talk about it. It seemed to calm them down, get it out of their systems. You could tell they were scared and wanted things to be normal.”

In Oxnard, teacher Laura Suel at Rose Avenue School agreed that discussing the earthquake in detail was therapeutic for second-grade students.

“A couple of them almost cried,” Suel said. “But by the time the first hour was over, I think they were feeling better.”

Not all children were traumatized by the earthquake: Some slept through it.

But 8-year-old Danika Jacob, a third-grader at Blanche Reynolds School in Ventura, said she did feel slightly different than usual when she woke up from her deep slumber Monday morning: “I had a stiff neck.”

Students in Danika’s class spent part of Tuesday morning making lists of items they want to get for their personal earthquake kits at home and drawing pictures of what they were doing during the earthquake. Danika’s picture showed her sound asleep in bed.

Middle-school students were more shook up by the earthquake than elementary school children because the older children better comprehend the danger, said Kris Bergstrom, principal at Cabrillo Middle School in Ventura. But children in the middle-school years are too young to cope well with emotions stirred up by such a disaster, she said.

“They know it’s serious and they know what the implications are, but they don’t know how to handle their emotions,” Bergstrom said. Many of the sixth- through eighth-grade students at Cabrillo acted sillier than usual Tuesday, she said, which she interpreted as their reaction to the earthquake.

The Simi Valley schools that are definitely scheduled to open Thursday are Abraham Lincoln Elementary, Apollo High, Berylwood Elementary, Crestview Elementary, Hillside Junior High, Hollow Hills Elementary, Justin Elementary, Madera Elementary, Park View Elementary, Royal High, Simi Elementary, Simi Valley Adult School, Sinaloa Junior High and Vista Elementary.

Times correspondents Matthew Mosk and Tracy Wilson contributed to this story.