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The school is only 100 meters from shore. A CNN crew accompanied Asokawa, principal of the school, on Tuesday as he climbed the steps and inspected the total damage to the school for the first time. There is mud, seaweed and fishing nets in the top floor of the 3-story building.

On one of the walls of the school the clock is frozen at 2:46 -- the time when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck. Toys, bags, wood, sand and seaweed are tangled in confusion. A stool hangs from the ceiling. Backpacks were orderly placed on cupboards, where 107 students ages 6 to 12 left them on Friday, when they ran for their lives.

But Asokawa is worried: the school has 108 students. One child was absent that day and he is missing. The rest of his students are in a nearby shelter, taken care of by their teachers, he said.

As the tsunami hit her school in Sendai, kindergarten teacher Junko Kamada stood in the window of a second story hall to block the children from seeing the destruction caused by the 1.5-meter wave. Amid dirt-caked chairs, soiled books and damaged equipment, Kamada, 60, is preparing to bring the students back to the school, about a mile inland from the coast. The children will also need counseling to deal with the trauma they have experienced, psychologists say.

Schools resumed two days ago in northeastern Japan, the epicenter of the March 11 magnitude-9 earthquake. Classes --some held in homes and makeshift spaces -- are providing a safe place for children to reunite with friends and a semblance of familiarity amid the nation’s worst disaster since World War II.

While adolescents attuned to the reality of death may act out their trauma, younger ones find it harder to articulate their distress, she said. People who suffer psychological ailments such as depression in childhood are 10 to 20 times more likely than others to experience those problems in adulthood, according to a 2010 study in the journal Social Science & Medicine. Affected individuals tend to leave school earlier and earn about 20 percent less over their lifetime, the authors found.