EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Trying Times for Displaced Valley Students : Schools: Children living in shelters find studying difficult and bus commutes long and lonely. The district lacks the resources to help them.

At 6:15 a.m., when the lights go on at the Mason Avenue Red Cross Shelter, Jannet Nguyen, 11, is among the first up and out of her cot. But then, she has a lot on her mind.

“Yesterday, I didn’t do my homework because those kids, they’re too noisy,” Jannet said, her words coming out in a rush of frustration while her mother implored her two younger sisters to wake up and get ready for school. “I’m worried about that. I don’t want to get a D or F. I don’t go on the same bus--I didn’t have to wait for the bus before. My schedule is different.

“It’s hard to go to school and live here.”

Three weeks after the Northridge quake--virtually a lifetime for Jannet and other children hardest hit by the temblor--Los Angeles Unified School district buses are still picking up more than 100 students at 11 different shelters. The children are taken to 67 different schools citywide, according to Alan Tomiyama, the district’s director of transportation.

The students on the shelter buses are a part of the most displaced of the Northridge victims. And for L.A. schools struggling to cope with a hobbled physical plant and an anxious staff and student body, they are at one extreme of a large group of students who were emotionally and physically isolated by Southern California’s worst disaster.

Their numbers are swelled by the ranks of students whom the quake left homeless but are coming to class on their own. Those students, officials said, are difficult to count.

“They are going to need a lot more resources and a lot more support,” said Dr. Loeb Aronin, the district’s director of psychological services. “We’ve never had enough psychologists, or enough nurses or support personnel in general. And now you’ve got a more critical crisis situation. . . . I don’t know that we have enough staff to keep up.”

Shelter bus routes will continue as long as there are displaced children who need to get to school, Tomiyama said. There is no date set for them to end.

At the Mason Recreation Center in Chatsworth, 23 children waited to be ferried to school by three buses that double back to make different trips along several routes.

Angelica, 6, started on her long bus ride to school with three other children she did not know, who go to a different school than the one she attends. She did not speak to them, opting instead to stare out the window.

The other children disembarked at Germain Street Elementary School, not far from the shelter where the group boarded, spilling out of the bus and running to join their friends. Angelica, dwarfed by the school bus’s long rows of empty green seats, still had a long ride to Lassen Elementary. She stared out the window at the Cal State Northridge tent city as the bus lumbered by.

“My home used to be close to the school,” she said, not taking her eyes from the window. “My mom drove me. I don’t have nobody to talk to now. I don’t like to be alone.”

Angelica is lonely in her traveling; other children are lonely in their plight.

Jannet, like many of the children at the Mason Avenue shelter, said she had not told her teacher the reasons for her difficulties with her reading assignment. “I don’t want her to know it because I don’t want to say it,” she said.

Los Angeles district buses also take Rachel Kinney, 12, from the shelter to her private Lutheran school in North Hollywood. Rachel and her mother, Wendy keep their troubles to themselves, as well.

“It’s a church school,” Wendy Kinney said. “On Sunday, everyone would say, ‘Awwww, are you OK?’ It’s kind of hard to take, so that’s why we’re keeping it quiet.”

As a result, other students are not as sensitive as they might be if they knew of her troubles, Rachel said. Classmates do not know why she has worn the same clothes day after day. They say things that they might not say if they knew about her situation, she said.

“They just sort of carry on with everything,” Rachel said over her shelter breakfast of Apple Jacks and a danish. “They talk about how mean their moms are, and they don’t even know how bad it can get. They talk about how their lives are so hard.”

She finished breakfast in time for her scheduled bus departure at 7:20. A blue-suited bus driver poked her head into the shelter to look for her morning wards. Wendy, Jannet and Jannet’s sisters grabbed sack lunches and walked slowly out the large shelter doors.

Jannet looked back at her mother before she boarded the bus.

“I hate it to live here,” Jannet said. “My sisters, they’re going to school and I know it’s hard for them because I’ve been their age. They need my help, but I just can’t help--I can’t even help myself.”