To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

PS 189 is a school community severely rocked by the Haitian earthquake, even before survivors began to show up. About a third of the students and faculty trace their roots back to Haiti, including the long-time principal.

"I was born and raised in Haiti. I lost a 17-year-old. I lost people," said PS 189 Principal Berthe Faustin.

"This hit us and it hit us real, real hard," said PS 189 Assistant Principal Victoria Fernandez. "There was not a single person in this building that wasn't walking around, you could see the weight on their shoulders -- from the custodians, from the kitchen staff, to the children. The little ones that may not have known exactly what was going on but they felt something was very different. That day just changed everything for us."

"Where you saw the resilience or the strength of our staff was that they had to put on hold what they themselves were feeling in order to administer to the children," said PS 189 Assistant Principal Hillary Steele.

There was already a bilingual class for Haitian Creole speakers in each grade, from kindergarten to eighth, but most of the classes were full. Yet the principal says they haven't turned away a single Haitian refugee during the past year. That means classes can have more than 40 students.

"The flights were canceled to Haiti. No one knew what was going on. You couldn't go there and help. So we did whatever we could from here," Fernandez said.

"We were fortunate in the sense that we were given extra funds for furniture because we ran out of desks. We ran out of chairs. We ran out of books. We ran out of everything," Faustin said.

The Department of Education has provided additional funding and has found community-based organizations to partner with schools like PS 189. Two different groups help provide counseling for the Haitian students, where there is just one pyschologist for almost 1,500 students.

"It's child specific, the reaction to the disaster is child specific. And also, it's very much related to the child's experience, personal experience," said School Psychologist Menes Dejoie.

Many of the children left their parents behind in Haiti. A few lost their parents. One refugee comes to school exhausted everyday. Relatives explain it's because his new apartment is near an elevated subway line and every time he feels the rumble of a passing train, he also shakes. But the staff at PS 189 feel they are uniquely qualified to help with an established bilingual program and the empathy of a community that knows the loss.