BAY AREA QUAKE : S.F. Schools Reopen, Offer Students Counseling

SAN FRANCISCO —  Schools in the Bay Area began to reopen Thursday with educators paying special attention to the mental health needs of their students, hosting visits from psychologists and holding special assemblies for children to talk about their earthquake experiences.

“I want the kids back in school. I want the teachers to have the opportunity to discuss the tragedy with them,” said Raul Cortines, San Francisco’s superintendent of schools, who opened 98 of the district’s 120 schools after they passed structural inspections.

Oakland and Berkeley public schools were closed Thursday, though a number of private schools in the East Bay area were open.

At the Park School in Oakland, a small school with classes from kindergarten through sixth grade, the morning began with an opportunity for each child to talk about the earthquake and where they were when it happened. Students were encouraged to write about it, or draw pictures of what they saw. Then the subject was dropped, in hopes of a return to normal life.

Talk and gentle reassurance, in fact, were precisely the prescriptions offered by mental health professionals for traumatized members of the Bay Area’s newest generation of earthquake survivors.

The need for such comforting remained great two days after the region’s devastating temblor. Many parents in the area who were interviewed reported that their children were crying, irritable, frightened or suffering from nightmares. And mental health centers that provide counseling for such youngsters said they were inundated with calls.

Children’s Hospital in San Francisco scheduled a special communitywide forum for Sunday that will “focus on the unique stresses faced by children,” said Jane Shannahan, the hospital’s director of social work.

Parents said the experience would likely remain with their children a long time.

“Every time we walk into the house, my 2-year-old daughter cries and says, ‘broken things, broken things,’ ” said Chris Finnegan of San Francisco, who said that her Richmond District kitchen was “ankle deep in glass” as a result of the quake. Zoe, the 2-year-old, and her 4-year-old brother, Zach, “woke up several times during the night screaming about the earthquake,” Finnegan added.

Many parents said their children were shadowing them closely. “One 4-year-old’s mother cannot walk across the room without the child at her side,” said Los Gatos psychologist Bob Hails.

“I was scared because my daddy was on the (San Francisco-Oakland Bay) bridge,” said 8-year-old Seth Orza. “I was scared but I didn’t cry.” Joy Orza, the boy’s mother, said Seth and his five brothers and sisters got little sleep the night of the quake even though their father got home safe three hours after the quake.

“The best way for a child to get over a frightening experience is to remember it and talk about it, with some emotion,” advised Kentfield psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Kliman. “The worst way to get over it is to deny it. That makes it unforgettable.”

Kliman said he is putting together a children’s book entitled “My Earthquake Book” that will include exercises for children to perform “to help them get over the experience in a structured way.”

At the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto, “we are getting calls from lots and lots and lots of parents,” said Annye Rothenberg, the psychologist who directs the organization’s child-rearing program.

“We advise parents to try to find out exactly what is worrying the child, and then to calmly reassure them,” she said. “We don’t want children to be carrying around on their shoulders the same level of worry that California adults carry on theirs.”

Typically, said Rothenberg, children express fears that “another big earthquake will occur, that their house will fall down, they will get lost from their parents or that they will fall through a crack.”

If a child expresses fears about an aftershock, “a parent might say: ‘Let’s see how that might feel. Let’s stand here and wiggle around on the ground. See? That wasn’t so bad.”’

Even for families that escaped relatively unscathed, the psychological impact of the jolt was reinforced by the constant barrage of television and radio coverage.

Children who are off from school tend to watch television, and TV in the Bay Area on Wednesday was little more than earthquake coverage. “I was so relieved when ‘Mr. Rogers’ finally came on,” said Tracy Weiss, a Palo Alto psychologist and mother of Matthew, 3, and Taylor, 1.

“They were really riveted to it,” she said. “To them, it was like a port in the storm.”

For Raymond Gross, 15, who lives in a run-down clapboard house in West Oakland, in the shadow of the now-infamous I-880 overpass that collapsed, there are no ports in the storm. The gangly, soft-spoken teen-ager was at home with his kid brother and sister when the earthquake struck and the double-decker freeway crumbled with a groan.

A hutch full of china crashed to the floor in Gross’ house. China figurines plummeted from shelves, all oddly beheaded. A large mirror tottered off the mantle piece and shattered into a thousand shards. The Christ figure dropped from the crucifix nailed to the living room wall.

Gross ran into the street and found a neighbor’s house seemingly on its knees, the lower story crushed under the upper. Riding his 6-year-old brother’s bike up Cypress Street, he found himself pressed into service helping carry stretchers laden with I-880 survivors to arriving ambulances.

“Their faces were split,” Gross recalled quietly during an interview in his home Thursday. “Some of them had to have stitches on the spot--eyes were all swollen, noses bleeding. Some had long gashes down their face.”

A few moved, barely perceptibly--the only evidence Gross could see that they were still alive. After a half-dozen loads, he couldn’t take any more. He thought of his father, who died last November after a two-year struggle with cancer.

Ben Canne, clinical coordinator for the West Coast Children’s Center in Albany, just north of Berkeley, said “an earthquake forces to the surface what we don’t want to deal with most of the time--the unpredictability of life, and the fact that things can just drop on us like bombs, or come up from the earth.”

“It forces us to deal with how fragile we are, how vulnerable we are,” said Canne.

This story was written by Victor Zonana with contributions from Janny Scott and Hector Tobar.