After a week without classes, students who returned to fire-damaged Lake Clifton-Eastern High School yesterday missed their books and audiovisual equipment. But even more, they longed for the warm shelter of the library building's corridors.
Those avenues to other parts of the huge school complex remained closed as the $1 million cleanup continued a week after the four-alarm blaze destroyed the library and damaged the school's central building.
As some students stepped through the school's northernmost door and waved their identification cards at a monitor, they were directed back out into the biting cold.
"This don't make no sense," complained Shawnette Wilson, 17, cautiously picking her way across ice patches as she was turned back. "I was dying to come back to school, but now I think they should have waited to reopen it."
The burned-out school library is at the center of the five-building complex, between the north entrance and the music class at the south end of the school where Shawnette is learning to play alto saxophone.
To reach her music classroom, she trudged nearly the full length of a high school called the nation's largest when it opened in 1971.
It was a four-minute, wind-whipped walk. Students sharing the path groaned as they compared schedules; most would have to make the bitter-cold trip more than once. Some had arrived looking underdressed for these journeys on one of the coldest mornings of the year.
"I think they should have waited until they got it all together," said Angela Holmes, as she tried to drop off her son Keith Griffin at the north entrance. He was scheduled for gym on the opposite side of the school, so he climbed back into the car and she headed for a south-end door.
As cleanup crews replaced ceiling tiles and hurried to reopen the corridors, administrators extended the length of the first period. Students and teachers needed extra time to take detours and record attendance at the start of the day.
Administrators set up a temporary office and enlisted students to help move hand trucks stacked with boxes of papers retrieved from an office damaged by water and smoke. Telephones were working, and the cafeteria was scheduled to open.
Yesterday, city school officials praised the rapid work of more than 300 laborers organized by an emergency construction company.
The workers spent the weekend scrubbing soot, securing dangerous sections of the building, hauling out burned and waterlogged furniture and books, blowing smoke from classrooms with giant fans and preparing for the return of the students.
City health and safety inspectors toured the school late Sunday and pronounced it fit to reopen.
Weekend snow and ice prevented many teachers from visiting the school to clean up their classrooms, but by yesterday the school mostly was back to normal -- except for the library, now boarded up with plywood and faintly smoke-scented.
"I was just in there the Friday before the fire," Terry Jefferson, 14, said as she walked past the boarded-up windows and construction trucks. "We were making a movie, telling students where the different books were, where the fiction section was and all. I heard it's all gone."