COLUMN ONE : Gulf Crisis Enters the Classroom : Schools near military bases are working to aid children who are fearful or depressed because one--or sometimes both--parents are deployed in the Mideast.

The third-grader shuffled into class at the El Toro Marine School and, exhausted, asked his teacher if he could lay his head on his desk. His father, a Marine in Saudi Arabia, had called the night before, and his mother had cried much of the night.

The boy had stayed up late holding and comforting her until she fell asleep.

“This, to me, was such a symbol of what so many kids are going through,” said the teacher, Nan Pelayo. “My God, this is a 9-year-old boy, and he’s staying up until the middle of the night helping his mother deal with this thing.”

The children of military personnel are accustomed to having a parent gone, but the stress of Operation Desert Shield--with the sudden deployment, prospect of heavy casualties and uncertain date of return--has taken a psychological toll. Some children are withdrawn and depressed at school; others crave attention and become behavior problems. Young children sometimes burst into tears when the Persian Gulf crisis comes up in class or on TV.

“Because of the potential danger, a lot of parents at home are more worried and depressed, and that’s passed along to the kids,” said Steven Sparta, chief psychologist at Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “So these children have to deal with a double punch--the loss of one parent, with the remaining parent less available to deal with their needs.”

Southern California schools near military bases are trying to help. Teachers are including more information on the Middle East in their classes to dispel rumors and reduce confusion. School districts are training teachers to identify and assist children troubled by a parent’s absence. Group counseling sessions for children are commonplace. And some school districts have contingency plans for counseling those whose parents are killed in combat.

The array of programs is unprecedented, school officials say, and a sharp contrast to what was offered during the Vietnam War. Many teachers avoided the subject of war and made no special efforts on behalf of students whose parents were overseas.

“We’re much more aware of the emotional needs of children today,” said Joan Burnside, assistant superintendent at the Morongo Unified School District, which includes schools near the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base. “ . . . When you’re dealing with a group of kids who every night are reminded on TV that their dads might be blown up . . . well, you don’t just ignore this and try to teach them to read. If they’re going to learn anything, you’re going to have to deal with some of their anxieties first.”

Phyllis Chutuk, a child development teacher at Oceanside High School, said one of her best students has been ignoring homework assignments recently and has been distracted in class.

“Lately I haven’t been up to par in any of my classes,” the student wrote in a note to her. “See, since my dad left for Saudi, my life has been a big, huge mess. You figure I’d be used it by now, but you don’t really get used to it. . . . It’s been real hard on my mother . . . and all these military wives keep my mother stressed and upset by calling her, crying. She doesn’t need that, seeing how she’s sad too. . . . I’m not trying to blame people or make excuses. I just feel real bad about my performance and I plan to improve. . . . Please forgive me.”

On a recent Monday morning at the Operation Desert Shield Counseling Group, a 16-year-old girl tells other Oceanside High School students that she now “feels all alone.” Her father, a Marine, has been in Saudi Arabia since August. Her mother, a member of the Army Reserves, was called up over the weekend.

“I have nobody left. . . . Everybody I care about is over there,” the girl said. “I worry all the time now that something is going to happen to them.” She begins to cry.

The school psychologist hands her a tissue. He asks who is taking care of her. She is staying with her aunt, but they do not get along. She has few friends because her family moved to Oceanside only a few months ago.

“It sounds stupid,” the girl said, “but yesterday I took down all the pictures of my parents from the walls. I thought it wouldn’t hurt so much if I didn’t think about them all the time. . . . It just doesn’t seem fair that the President took both my parents. Why couldn’t he have left just one?”

The psychologist counsels her for a few minutes. Then other students begin to talk about themselves and their families.

“My dad called last night, said hello, and before he could say anything else, my mom broke down. . . .”

“I just hear they just sent 2,000 body bags over there. That’s scary. . . .”

“My dad left a few days ago and it was real hard for him. He walked up to the ship and never even turned around and looked back. . . .”

“A friend of the family was over the other night and he said it’s not going to get better over there, it’s only going to get worse. My sister started crying, and the whole family got depressed. . . .”

School psychologist Gene Ramos has been participating in these weekly sessions, along with two counselors, since the beginning of the school year. As the deployment drags on and tension at home mounts, he said, students are increasingly anxious about their parents’ safety.

“Students are able to express their worries and fears here . . . they can break down and cry and get a sense of support from the other students who are going through the same things,” Ramos said. “Some of them can’t do this at home. Some of their moms are having real emotional problems, and these kids think they have to appear strong and stable to keep the family together.”

Elementary school children often ask if their parents are going to die in the Middle East.

“You can’t reassure them that dad will make it home safely and that nothing will happen to him. . . . That’s unrealistic,” said Charles Hogan, a psychologist at Hancock Elementary School in San Diego, next to a Navy housing complex. “If something does happen, then you’ll lose your credibility. The best thing we can do is let them express their concerns. And we can explain that this is all part of their dad’s job, he has been well trained and they need to trust in the fact that he’ll do his job well.”

Schools in Twentynine Palms have plans to set up centers at the school where children and family members can meet in the event of a parent’s death. “That’s when we’ll be needed the most,” said Burnside of the Morongo school system.

Children of single mothers serving in the Persian Gulf have had a particularly difficult time. One woman in the Air Force was sent home from Saudi Arabia because her three young children, who were staying with a neighbor, were so upset by her absence that they were causing problems at school and for the neighbor who was looking after them, said Victoria Magathan, principal of the George Air Force Base School near Victorville.

“The first-grader became a real discipline problem in class and started getting into fights on the schoolyard,” Magathan said. “The younger ones were having a hard time because they missed their mother. The neighbor who was taking care of them had kids of her own and just couldn’t handle the situation anymore.”

The Pentagon argues that parents should be prepared to be called away at a moment’s notice. Military personnel are required to designate a family member or friend to assume temporary guardianship of their children.

“They know they could be separated from their children,” said Air Force Capt. Billy Birdwell, a spokesman for the Department of Defense. “We don’t try to hide that or sugarcoat it.”

Many parents in the reserves, however, were taken by surprise because there had not been a comparable call-up of reserve units since the Korean War. The deployment was so sudden that even full-time military personnel were caught off-guard.

After the first troops were dispatched in August, schools throughout Southern California moved quickly to develop programs for children of military personnel. In the Morongo Unified School District, a psychologist held a training session for teachers who worked at schools near the Marine base. The district also compiled a booklet for teachers titled “Providing a Supportive Classroom for Dealing With the Persian Gulf Situation.”

The book suggests that teachers develop stress-relieving activities through music, art, writing and role-playing; arrange parent-teacher conferences; help students write to their deployed parents, and watch for signs of child abuse and neglect.

The Irvine and the San Diego school districts have asked counselors at nearby military bases to speak to teachers and school staff. Counselors at the Naval Station San Diego Family Service Center are scheduled to give lectures at more than 50 local schools.

“We’re the experts on deployment, we just don’t have enough staff to work with every kid who has a parent in the Middle East,” said Nancy Tarbell, deputy director of the Family Service Center. “So we’ve been teaching the schools how to help kids cope with this thing.”

At the El Toro Marine School, where hundreds of yellow ribbons are tied to the chain-link fence in front to show support for the troops, students can join the Overseas Club and meet regularly with others who have parents in the Middle East. Teachers at the Condor Elementary School in Twentynine Palms help children write letters to parents. Other schools post photographs of parents in uniform on bulletin boards and collect “care packages” to send to Saudi Arabia.

“In some of these classrooms, two-thirds of the dads were gone overnight,” said assistant superintendent Burnside. “We’ve never had a deployment like that before, not even during Vietnam. So we all wanted to make sure . . . we did everything we could to help some very frightened students.”