Schoolchildren Begin Road Back to Normalcy

The nation’s largest school district reopened Thursday, but no one pretended that the 1,100 schools or the 1.1 million students were returning to normal.

It was a day when many New Yorkers took their children to school hand in hand, even if the kids normally walked by themselves or took a bus--or normally would be mortified to be seen with Mom and Dad.

Once inside, it was a day when a first-grade assignment in lower Manhattan included drawing “something threatening.” One kid drew a shark, but others drew explosions. In Brooklyn, a third-grader drew the sun crying over the World Trade Center.

Sixth-graders searched through their T-shirt collections to find ones that said “Save the planet” or “We’re all in this together.”

“It was sort of like a normal day, but we were having meetings about what happened at the twin towers and how we felt,” said Ari Garin, a third-grader at P.S. 11 on West 21st Street who felt he’d like to be a superhero so that he could combat the terrorists. “I’d bonk them over the head with a stick.”

Teachers, parents and school officials all said they hoped that New York’s classrooms could return to normal as soon as possible. But Thursday clearly was too soon.

Ten high schools and 12 elementary and middle schools below 14th Street in Manhattan remained closed, leaving 23,000 students with no place to go. Overall, attendance was roughly 70%, well down from the typical 88% to 90%. But still “pretty good,” a district spokesman said, considering what the city--and the students--had been through.

Across the United States this week, educators prepared special lessons and counseling for students who had seen the destruction on television. But schools here had to prepare for kids who did not need TV to know what had happened.

At century-old Washington Irving High School on West 16th Street, students found a Red Cross crisis center set up in the main lobby, with tables of food and bottled water and bedding piled on the back wall. “Did something happen to the 59th Street Bridge?” a nervous Linda Stark asked a police officer after escorting her 5-year-old to the preschool next door. Normally the nanny would have taken the boy, she said, but not this day.

Ray Medina usually would not have been taking his 5-year-old son to P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, a Brooklyn neighborhood across New York Harbor from where the twin towers once stood. But two days earlier, he’d barely escaped from there, then trudged home over the Brooklyn Bridge, his business suit covered in ash and soot.

Dr. Saadia Qureshi, who had been working around the clock at nearby Long Island College Hospital, took time off from tending to victims of the disaster so she could take her son and daughter, 5 and 6, to Cobble Hill, a job normally handled by her mother. Qureshi’s children and others of Middle Eastern descent make up about 8% of Cobble Hill’s student body.

The school superintendent for the area sent letters to parents--in six languages--appealing for all groups to “embrace each other and accept all cultures and races.”

But Fateh El-Qalisi wasn’t taking any chances. A doorman in Manhattan, he did not send his three kids to school Thursday. He pointed to his wife, shrouded in a black head scarf and robe, and said: “She’s scared to death to go outside. Her friends have told her stories of women being attacked, people trying to tear their scarves off their heads.”

Rosanna Tafuri, a childhood development specialist, was helping out Thursday at Cobble Hill when one Arabic boy’s mother embraced her “and said she was sorry, apologizing like the whole tragedy was her fault. I told her we’re all feeling the same pain.”

Paula Lombardo gave her fourth-grade class free time to draw or write. One child drew a picture of the World Trade Center’s twin towers turning into monsters. Another girl drew a crayon picture of a beautiful blue sky, with the sun crying as a plane approached the towers.

The fourth and fifth floors of Cobble Hill were declared off limits Thursday. It was on the top floor that students such as 9-year-old Devin Bittner sat Tuesday in a classroom with windows facing the World Trade Center. “We heard an explosion and we looked out the window and saw smoke on the twin towers. Some people thought a meteor hit it,” Devin said.

On Thursday, “We talked about it for only a little while and then we got back to our regular routine,” he added. “One of my friends said her uncle jumped from the 60th story and broke a lot of bones but was still alive.”

The day went much the same at P.S. 11 and Clinton Middle School on West 21st Street in Manhattan: Time for kids to speak their minds, ask questions and draw or write--then run out into the arms of waiting parents at the end of the day.

A father who gave his name only as Ray sat on the school steps watching the news on a small television until his daughter Selena, 11, came bounding outside. Selena told him she had gotten to write down “how sad it was, but how they’re gonna make new buildings to replace those towers.”

A fellow sixth-grader, ponytailed Rachel, 11, smiled through her braces as she related how students got to “free-write” in a humanities class. “I talked about the horrible things the terrorists were doing. Why did they do this? Why did they crash into these buildings and cause all this destruction and fear? I was writing about how angry and sad I was--what they were doing to people just leading their normal lives and then, bang! There it goes.”

“It was not a normal day,” she added. “I was worried about the Empire State Building getting bombed.”

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Times special correspondent Lauren Sandler contributed to this story.