Everything was altered, even a recollection of the simplest pleasures of parenting. A mother wept as she told EL how she had watched the Monday sunset last week from a Brooklyn rooftop, naming the buildings on the Manhattan skyline for her eight-month-old baby: "....And that's the World Trade Centre." The next day she and the baby were shut inside their home, with windows closed, as the smoke from the buildings' remains billowed down her street.

Even for a parent at such a blessed remove from tragedy, emotions ran high.

Hundreds of children weren't as well protected from the horror as that baby boy. Thursday's New York Times reported: "A boy at Stuyvesant High School watched from a window of the school library as people fell or jumped to their deaths from the burning twin towers a few blocks south. A classmate standing next to him crossed himself every time a body catapulted into empty air. And the boy, who is Jewish, wished that he could do something, if only to make such symbolic gestures himself."

At Public School 234 in downtown Manhattan, children screamed: "Is my mother dead?" Children who were not collected, the newspaper said, "were marched like a column of refugees under police escort to PS 41 in Greenwich Village. Lunchroom workers carried little children on piggyback..."

Further away from the gruesome reality of that deathly Tuesday, things remained, unbelievably, "calm and well organised", according to Manhattan mothers. The collection of their children from school offered little more than trivial but troubling inconveniences: one mother recalled her consternation when the school refused to allow her to wheel in a buggy carrying her three-week-old baby when she called to collect her child as requested. The reason? Security. She was forced to carry the baby into the school.

Tuesday morning was blue-skied and sunny when one Manhattan-dweller, Susan, and her six-year-old set off for their school on Central Park West. "I dropped my son at school at 8.30 and went on to the office," she recalled. "I got the news when I got there. I called home immediately. My 18-month-old baby was with the sitter and I wanted to make sure that she stayed in place. I called the school and they said everything was fine and they were keeping children till dismissal time - 12 noon." (It was the second day of term, and a half day.)

"At first I didn't know what to do, but then I felt I wanted to get the children, so I left the office and walked the two miles from midtown to the school (public transport was almost at a halt). I was anxious to get back to the baby. The school was very well organised and had arranged for parent-volunteers to deliver children from the classroom to their parents. Every child had to be signed for."

Her son had been told nothing about the disaster. A number of parents worked at the World Trade Centre and there were fears that some of the children would be affected.

Chris Pendry's 14-year-old son Nick was forced to spend Tuesday night away from home. They live in Manhattan, but he goes to school in the Bronx. "Tuesday night he had to stay up there with a friend because the bridge was closed and he couldn't get back," she said. Nick learned of the tragedy through a school friend who feared his father, another WTC worker, was dead. Fortunately, the man had gone late to work and missed the attack. "I didn't realise how bad it was till I got home," said Nick.

New York City's board of education reacted swiftly to the crisis. Children who used public transport were allowed to remain in school until the system was working again. Children who used school buses left as normal, but drivers were instructed not to drop off pupils unless a parent or guardian was present at the bus stop. Unmet children were brought to designated schools in the district.

Schools in New York City, apart from downtown Manhattan, re-opened on Thursday. Before that, however, New York principals, assistant principals, guidance counselors, social workers and crisis teams were asked to report to their schools to prepare plans to respond to the tragedy. "Their work will include co-ordinating crisis intervention, arranging for grief counselling services and planning other support services for students and staff," the board's chancellor, Harold O Levy, said.

Teachers, too, spent time training to deal with the aftermath. Teach for America, an organisation which encourages high-flying college graduates to take up public school teaching, organised a seminar for 220 teachers in New York City. Cami Anderson, its executive director, said: "Giving children the opportunity to discuss their emotions and understand that it is normal for them to feel different can lesson the likelihood that there will be emotional outbursts in the classroom. It's important that people feel that they have been heard and reassured and that their concerns haven't been glossed over."