Displaced Students Make Do in Brooklyn

By Nick Chiles | STAFF WRITER

September 21, 2001

Thousands of students who were forced out of eight lower Manhattan schools by last week's World Trade Center attacks spent their first day at their borrowed schools yesterday under the watchful eyes of school officials and nervous parents.

Schools' Chancellor Harold Levy sent deputies from his staff to the schools to oversee the logistics. School officials had to grapple with the dual tasks of absorbing hundreds of students into schools without much extra space and reassuring parents that the plans were well laid out.

"I think today went very well," Levy said yesterday evening. "My impression is the schools opened very smoothly, the parents, teachers and kids were extremely cooperative, and children were pleased to be back in school."

Levy said attendance was "very high" in the affected school districts - districts 1 and 2 - but the citywide attendance of 86 percent was four points lower than normal.

Levy isn't sure when most of the schools will be able to return to their original buildings, but he did find out that the school system will return to Stuyvesant High School on Oct. 1. Levy anticipates it will then take about two more weeks after that to get the school, now being used as a supply depot for the rescue effort, ready for students.

But for now, school officials are overseeing a combined Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Technical High School, which has more than 7,500 students and is likely the largest high school in America.

Around 11 a.m. yesterday, thousands of Stuyvesant students, many of them accompanied by their parents, streamed up De Kalb Avenue in Brooklyn toward Brooklyn Tech. The students gathered in the auditorium for an orientation while several teachers stayed outside to answer questions from anxious parents.

"Don't be nervous," English teacher Julie Sheinman told a group of parents. "Things are very organized."

Inside the auditorium, Stuyvesant students received their schedules and discovered that school officials had trimmed their class times from 40 minutes to 30 minutes so that they could begin their day at 1:30 p.m. and not have any overlap with the Brooklyn Tech students, who begin at 7:15 a.m. Stuyvesant students will be released at 6:30 p.m.

The schedule puts the two rival schools in the same building but at different times to avoid conflicts among students.

"They know there's a bit of tension between Brooklyn Tech kids and Stuyvesant kids - they try to intimidate Stuyvesant kids," said Stuyvesant sophomore Edward Baronowski, 16, who joined his classmates in swarming over Fulton Street and downtown Brooklyn after they were released early yesterday. "We will be arriving after they leave."

Brooklyn Tech junior Daniel Gvertz said he's heard some of his classmates saying that there will be trouble if they hear any Stuyvesant students bad-mouthing their school.

"I think a lot of the tension may be because Brooklyn Tech kids think since we didn't get into Stuyvesant, we have to prove we're as smart as they are," Gvertz said.

Not all parents were comfortable bringing their children to the combined schools. Susan Fox is still dealing with anxiety from last weeks events. She kept her daughter out of her kindergarten class at Public School 234 yesterday.

"With all the upheaval, I was feeling kind of anxious and overwhelmed by the number of children in her classroom," said Fox, who was told that her child would be sharing a classroom with another kindergarten class and a first-grade class. "I wanted to give the schools a chance to work out the kinks."

Fox said she would sit down with her husband to decide whether they were going to give it a try today.