Church agrees to house students displaced by school fire

School will likely be back in session Tuesday for the more than 300 students displaced after a devastating fire gutted the South Bay Elementary School in West Babylon Thursday night, school officials promised Friday.

Our Lady of Grace Roman Catholic Church in West Babylon is expected to house the students, district officials said late Friday at an emergency meeting to authorize funding for the move.

The church is located in West Babylon on Albin Avenue. All students from the K-5 South Bay Elementary, including those who routinely walk to school, will be bused to Our Lady of Grace.

District officials said the plan is not final and they are still working out details of the lease. The plan will be covered by insurance, officials said.

The district will hold a forum for parents Sunday at 1 p.m. at West Babylon High School.

"What we are really looking to do is to keep the building together," said West Babylon Superintendent Anthony Cacciola.

Hardly anything inside the wood-framed school is salvageable, school and fire officials said, after the fire burned through the entire one-story building gutting classrooms and hallways.

Shari McDonald brought her 5-year-old daughter, Abigail, to see what happened to her kindergarten classroom.

"It's just horrible," she said as she gripped her daughter's hand across the street from the school.

South Bay, which opened in 1953, is one of five elementary schools in the West Babylon school district.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation, said Gil Hanse, fire marshal for the Town of Babylon. The fire started in the middle of school and spread to a section between the rafters and the ceiling and then throughout the corridors of the school. No one was in the school when the fire occurred.

Teachers and parents surveyed the damage Friday.

First-grade teacher Ann Lauricella looked at her classroom where red paper hearts remained taped to the window, but the door was propped open as acrid smoke filled the air.

"I'm in shock," she said, looking at the ground where colored construction paper spread like confetti on the pavement. "I feel like going over there and picking up stuff off the floor."

Donna Senzamici, the school's nurse for 15 years, said her office is completely gone.

"All the medical files, everything you have had for 15 years," she said. "It's awful."

Diana Doerbecker, the school's PTA president who has a child in the school, had attended South Bay as a girl.

"It means a lot to me," she said.

With Joseph Mallia