L.A. Schools, Parents Dealt a Crippling Blow : Education: Damage to campuses displaces 250,000 children. District may face $700-million repair bill.

All Los Angeles Unified schools will remain closed at least through Friday and 150 quake-damaged campuses are closed indefinitely as educators and parents grapple with the district’s most formidable crisis ever: what to do with the children.

About 250,000 of the 640,000 students in the nation’s second-largest school system have neither clean nor safe classrooms to return to. About 80,000 youths bused around the 700-square-mile district face a grueling commute over buckled, broken and gridlocked roads.

As inspections of schools, especially in the San Fernando Valley, continue, officials estimate that damage has skyrocketed to as much as $700 million, enough to bankrupt the district 10 times over.

On Friday, district officials will announce plans for the week ahead.

The already-hemorrhaging district is in a crisis like never before, and the brunt of it is falling squarely on the shoulders of parents, teachers, administrators and the children as the fragile balance of school, work and day care crumbles.

“We have all the odds against us. How can we take one more crisis? This is so devastating it could cause someone to literally throw up their hands, find a hole and disappear,” school board President Leticia Quezada said Wednesday. “But we don’t have the luxury of that choice. Too many children are depending on us.”

Even in the best of times, it is a delicate equilibrium that allows families of the 1990s to get the children off to school, the parents to work, the children picked up and everyone home on time for dinner. One hitch and the relay falters; one earthquake and it caves in.

“There is no normalcy anymore. The children don’t have their routines. They feel so displaced,” said Karlene Weg of Encino, whose daughter’s elementary school classroom overlooks a two-foot gap in the earth. “They don’t feel safe anywhere.”

Melanie Otey designed her 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. work schedule around her children’s school day. Now Crescent Heights Boulevard Elementary, which her daughter attends, is a wreck. Her son’s school is closed until further notice. Her husband, a writer, has a deadline to meet next week and she is needed back at the Brentwood advertising office where she is a business manager. A Roy Rogers ranch outing with friends will occupy the children today, but what about Friday?

“Friday?” Otey said wearily. “That’s still two days away.”

Even when her children return to school, Otey can no longer travel the freeway route she used to pick up her children in the 20-minute window she has allowed herself. “This schedule doesn’t leave a lot of room for error,” she said, deciding to worry about that later. It is challenging enough to console two nervous children, one of whom clings to her mother with every aftershock.

Damage estimates have skyrocketed to as much as $700 million as engineers and inspectors continue to survey school buildings. At least 108 of the Valley’s 187 schools have sustained significant damage, including 24 that are badly battered, with collapsed walls, broken ceilings and toppled cafeteria equipment. District officials pledged to update parents Friday.

All of it comes at a time when school officials, recovering from unprecedented budget cuts and labor strife, were just beginning to focus on a new course for education reform and the restructuring of the district.

Instead, it is all they can do now to get children back into schools with drinking water, usable lights and toilets that flush.

Some teachers took it upon themselves to keep students on a course of study, however unorthodox. Dave McClay leaned inside the back of his pickup truck Wednesday and handed math, social studies and science books to Aurora Rivas, 9.

“I want you to do some homework, honey,” he said gently. “It’ll help you and it’ll keep you busy.”

McClay, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at Valerio Street Elementary School in Van Nuys, spent the morning putting textbooks in paper shopping bags and delivering homework to students, some living in trucks outside of their battered apartments.

“I just refuse to sit by and not have them study,” McClay said. “We have so little time with these kids as it is.”

State and local officials are moving quickly to bring financial and other aid to the district. State officials said 98 portable classrooms are available for immediate shipment to Valley school sites if needed.

“Deliver them, we’ll take them,” a delighted Dom Shambra, director of planning and development for the district, told a panel of state legislators in Sacramento on Wednesday. He said decisions would be made later in the week on where the portable classrooms would be placed.

The district is in no danger of losing state funding based on school attendance because of the emergency conditions, said Maureen DiMarco, the governor’s top education adviser. She said another option for quick financial aid may be to allow the district to use its state school construction money for rebuilding.

On the home front, parents--some already being summoned back to work--struggle to find child care. They are cashing in on sick days and vacation time to cover for school closures. Car pools are falling apart. Children, many at home without water or electricity for three days, are beginning to squabble. Cabin fever is setting in.

And even when schools reopen, some parents will be tormented by the idea of being more than an arm’s length away from their children, whatever their ages.

Even a clean safety inspection at Franklin High School is not enough to convince Marta Cardenas that it is all right for her 18-year-old son to return to school anytime soon. The continued aftershocks and the thought of being separated from him are more than she can deal with this week.

“What if there is another bad quake and we can’t get together? It’s so scary to even think of that,” said Cardenas, 47, who is active in the district’s bilingual education issues. “We are not in a steady situation. I don’t want to add any more confusion in my life right now.”

Some teachers were equally jittery about the prospect of going back to work.

“It’s going to be very nerve-racking--especially for the kids,” said Francine Cantero, an eighth-grade science teacher at Portola Middle School in Tarzana. “Every time there’s an aftershock, we’re going to do a drop drill and have kids under tables. It’s going to be very hard to get back on track.”

While the rest of the city aims for a return to normalcy, many children--whether in private or public schools--will never resume their familiar routines, facing instead the prospect of campus transfers, year-round schedules and makeshift classrooms.

“They used to go to sleep at 8. Now it’s like summer schedule, whatever they want to do is fine,” said Diane Neubauer of Westwood, the mother of five children, all of them at home since the quake. Her 13-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, is in the middle of finals at Harvard Westlake, a private school in Holmby Hills. She studies every night on the off chance that school will open the next morning. So far it hasn’t.

“Every night at 8 o’clock they call and let us know,” Neubauer said.

Children are asking questions that make it difficult for parents to leave them. One 6-year-old girl asked her mother: “Is the earthquake all gone?” Another child wanted to know “why the freeways are broken.”

“Just in case, I want to be with my kids,” said Elena Silverman of Encino, whose daughter attends Castlemont School in Woodland Hills. “We have all been sleeping together in the same room.”

One mother, who attends UCLA part-time, is considering dropping out of her classes to stay home with her children. “It’s only one night a week I would be leaving my kids. But that’s all it takes is one night. My head is spinning.”