Somerville school scrambles for solutions

Uprooted by fire, hundreds coping

Jennifer (left) and Natalie Gutierrez looked yesterday for signs of Sunday's fire at East Somerville Community School. (Michele McDonald/Globe Staff)

SOMERVILLE - Eleven-year-old Jennifer Gutierrez and her sister, Natalie, 10, hope their grades didn't go up in smoke when fire severely damaged the East Somerville Community School early Sunday.

"I thought I was going to have a good grade for the next month, and look what happened," Jennifer said yesterday, motioning across the street toward the school's boarded-up southeast wing. "I thought I was going to have honor roll."

School administrators carried student academic and medical records from the 35-year-old building yesterday as contractors continued to clean up and assess the damage, two days after fire tore through the school, where 585 students attended pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

School is canceled through Friday, while district officials prepare classroom space in three other school buildings - the Edgerly Education Center, the former Cummings School, and Capuano Early Childhood Center, district officials announced last night.

The state fire marshal and city fire chief ruled yesterday the "most probable cause" was an electrical problem in a heater in Room 108, a first-floor classroom. A city engineer has advised that the southeast wing of the school be demolished, but officials were awaiting analyses from engineering consultants and insurance adjusters to determine whether that wing and the entire 120,000-square-foot building could be salvaged.

The challenge of uprooting an entire school, much of which has been reduced to rubble, in the midst of an academic year has had administrators scrambling since dawn on Sunday.

"Even if and when we have space, we have no desks, we have no materials, we have no records," Superintendent Anthony Pierantozzi said yesterday outside the school. "We have no lesson plans, and no student work materials.

"If we get this going soon, hopefully within a week or two, it's going to be a major logistical challenge."

Hundreds of families made alternate plans for their children. Some were left with relatives, while others stayed at the city libraries.

Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone said parents, many of whom attended that school, wonder what's going to happen.

"There are a lot of questions, and that's understandable," he said. "We're going to reopen this school, one way or another. And we're going to work with the School Department to make sure kids have a healthy and safe place to learn."

The Somerville School Committee approved a school reassignment plan at an emergency meeting last night.

Students in first through fifth grades, plus sixth graders in the Unidos bilingual education program, will attend classes in the Edgerly Education Center. The remaining sixth graders, along with seventh and eighth grade students, will be placed in rehabilitated classrooms at the Cumming School. Kindergartners will be placed in the Capuano Early Childhood Center. All the facilities are located within a half-mile of the burned school.

Pierantozzi said officials hope to resume classes as early as Monday. The city is working on a plan to provide supervised daycare for as long as classes remain canceled, along with alternate sites for free breakfasts and lunches, officials said.

Jennifer and Natalie Gutierrez, who walked by the school with their grandfather yesterday, said they don't know what they will do with their time.

Natalie was concerned about not being able to go to class with her friends if the school moves students. Jennifer was concerned that some of her personal things, such as a baby picture she had brought for an assignment, might have been burned. She had also left a book project inside, which had not been graded.

"I'm not doing it again," she said.

John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com.