Double Agony

Lucas Rosario, 8, of New York City has new clothes and some extra toys lent to him by his best friend Harry. When he and his parents go out to dinner, which is almost every night now, he gets to pick the restaurant. But if you ask Lucas, none of this is lucky. He witnessed the two planes crashing into the World Trade Center, his "favorite buildings," and saw people jumping to their deaths. And the reason he is freshly outfitted and eating out is that he and his parents Julio Rosario and Joan Lader have been living a vagabond existence since Sept. 11. They have moved four times since they were evacuated from their Tribeca apartment two blocks north of ground zero. They have relied on the kindness of friends, who have found them vacant apartments or taken them in. Lucas has been doubly displaced--from his home and from Public School 234, which has moved twice since Sept. 11. And now bedtime offers little respite. "I have trouble sleeping because of the things that happened," he says.

The Rosarios are some of the 25,000 people who had to flee their homes after the Sept. 11 attacks. These urban refugees packed suitcases with as much as they could carry, leaving much behind. Some continue to stay with family and friends; others reside in hotels. For all the children in these families, though, the effect is the same: at the very time they need stability and support, they are uprooted from their emotional and physical surroundings, sleeping without their stuffed animals and attending school in overcrowded, foreign buildings.

Fifth-grader Dylan Samson, 10, attended P.S. 89, a school near the Twin Towers; now students from that school and P.S. 150 are sharing facilities at P.S. 3. "It's just really crammed in and hard there," says Dylan. "You're with such a big class. It's very noisy. I can barely hear myself think. They don't even have soap in the bathrooms. It makes me feel kind of a little crazy." Says artist Sharon Sprague, Dylan's mother: "Some classes don't have tables or desks. The kids are doing their work on the floor." But to her, the most painful legacy of Sept. 11 has been the splintering of a community. "There are so many people who left," Sprague says, referring to families who relocated or enrolled their kids in new schools. The New York City board of education is planning to move the kids of P.S. 89 to another temporary location with more space, but that will mean a longer commute for most families.

The nomadic life has already taken a huge toll on the neighborhood families. "Look, we didn't lose any family members. We can manage with the other things," says Terry Lautin, 40, a mother of two kids. But while looking for a new apartment, Lautin, a real estate agent, has been in need of work, and her kids' schools have been relocated further uptown. The toughest moment was when the family had to say goodbye to two people who decided to leave New York, including Lautin's 78-year-old mother, who had lived with her. "She had a full life here. But once we started moving, we couldn't move Grandma from place to place," says Lautin. So the grandmother moved to Sacramento, Calif., to live with her son. Lautin's son Sam, 11, had to say goodbye to his best friend who moved when his mother relocated for work. "That has been the worst. My son is devastated. Tim was part of our family. We love this kid," says Lautin.

While the neighborhood's social fabric has been torn, its environment has yet to be restored, which has caused anxiety among local parents. Ever since the towers collapsed in clouds of dust and debris, residents have complained about the smell and expressed concern about possible hazardous particles in the air. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman tried to reassure the neighborhood earlier this month by saying, "Contaminant levels are low or nonexistent [and] generally confined to the Trade Center site." But some parents aren't convinced. "There can be a 20- to 40-year lag time before people show the signs of asbestos inhalation," says Pauline Ores, a displaced mother of two young girls. "Our kids will be in the prime of their life. If there's a mistake, my daughter's going to pay."

The emotional cost also will be hard to measure as the years unfold. "I'm suspecting that we'll see signs of trauma--anxiety and depression--in kids who went into this with vulnerabilities, who have suffered previous traumas and losses," says Bruce Arnold, a child psychologist who consults at P.S. 234. He says kids who have adequate home and school support, however, will have a good chance of recovering. "They should be given

the space to forget about it, have fun and do some familiar things," says Arnold. He discourages parents from sharing too many details of the tragedy because kids can quickly feel overloaded. When Heather Brown told her son Luke, 10, that one of his classmates at P.S. 150 lost her father, Luke responded angrily toward his mom, saying, "Why did you tell me? It made me feel bad." Later Luke said, "I never, ever think about it because it makes me too sad."