East Coast Schools Struggle to Reopen

A worker scrapes up mud and tiles on Sunday from flood-damaged Saint Rose High School in Belmar, N.J., as the region tries to clean up the damage from last week's storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy.

—Mel Evans/AP

By Lesli A. Maxwell

In the days after Hurricane Sandy battered the Eastern Seaboard, educators across multiple states faced the daunting task of reopening thousands of schools amid widespread power outages, flooding and wind damage, and other aftereffects of a storm that caused one of the largest disruptions to schooling in the United States in recent years.

The 1.1 million students in the New York City system were out of school for five straight days this week—the longest districtwide disruption in the history of that school system other than teacher strikes. Officials there were preparing to reopen next week as authorities scrambled to restore power, pump out floodwaters, clean up debris, and restart, at least partially, the city's vast system of buses and subway transportation widely used by students.

Hundreds of districts in New York state and New Jersey—where what was soon dubbed the "superstorm" made landfall early this week—were shuttered following the storm, with many likely to remain closed into next week. Schools from North Carolina to Maine and as far west as West Virginia and Ohio were also shut down for part of the week because of the reach of the storm, which had killed at least 98 people in the United States as of a Nov....