UPI
Debris from damaged homes lies piled up across the street from the shuttered PS 114 in Belle Harbor.
Hurricane Sandy scattered hundreds of students from one Queens school — to locales as far away as Nashville.
At least 230 students from Belle Harbor’s PS 114 have enrolled in public schools in other parts of the city — the most by far of any storm-struck city school — while dozens of others are now in schools in Long Island, Connecticut, Virginia and Tennessee.
The school was among more than a half-dozen in the Rockaways battered by the storm — which damaged many houses in the surrounding neighborhood as well.
“My closest friends and my family either all live in Rockaway or [the hard-hit Long Island town of] Long Beach, so we didn’t really have places to go that were not two hours away,” said Monica Kalfur, who sent her 9-year-old daughter to live with a cousin and attend parochial school 900 miles away in Tennessee.
The mom, whose house was severely damaged by the storm, said just one student in her daughter’s fourth-grade class has shown up at an alternative site set up by the city in Glendale, Queens, 12 miles away.
“It just worked better trying to keep her in one place while we’re trying to work on the house,” Kalfur added. “She’ll come home right after Thanksgiving, and we’ll figure out where we’re living.”
Some parents said the city’s solution for their damaged school building — sending kids there, then having them board shuttle buses at 7 a.m. to one of three alternative sites — just didn’t work.
Attendance for PS 114 students at the three sites last week ranged from 2 to 10 percent.
“We weren’t given any information on our school or any idea when it is going to open... so all of the families immediately scattered,” said Missy Reder, who needs to wake up at 5 a.m. at a friends’ home on Long Island in order to get her four kids to the shuttle bus.
Other PS 114 families are driving in from Staten Island or renting apartments near the temporary school sites, according to posts on a Facebook page.
“The problem is nobody knows where they’re living the next week,” added Reder. “Most of us, we’re bouncing around.”
As of today, about 18,000 city students are still in relocated schools.
Officials said PS 114 would be among 31 schools they expect to fully repair by month’s end. Six other damaged schools - including PS 207 in Howard Beach - won’t be ready until 2013.
Additional reporting by Kathianne Boniello
yoav.gonen@nypost.com
Queens school’s student exodus
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Queens school’s student exodus
