PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — After seven weeks with seven kids hud­dled under a shel­ter of tarps and bed sheets on the median strip of a busy road, Lis­sithe Delomme says the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment can’t reopen schools fast enough.

“If they would open right now I’d be pretty happy,” she said, try­ing to ignore the tumult of two of her boys wrestling as she fried up a batch of plan­tains for sale. “They’re just sit­ting around doing nothing.”

The Jan. 12 quake dealt a dev­as­tat­ing blow to Haiti’s already strug­gling schools: More than 80 per­cent in the earth­quake zone were dam­aged or destroyed. All in Port-au-Prince and the other affected towns remain closed, and with tens of thou­sands of bored and rest­less chil­dren liv­ing in increas­ingly squalid encamp­ments, patience is grow­ing short.

On Mon­day, a group of pri­vate school direc­tors deliv­ered a peti­tion to Pres­i­dent Rene Preval decry­ing the lack of gov­ern­ment action and demand­ing schools reopen imme­di­ately — be they in tents, tem­po­rary build­ings or other makeshift facilities.

But some are urg­ing cau­tion before rush­ing back into a sys­tem that never really worked in the first place.

“This is an oppor­tu­nity in a life­time to rad­i­cally change the edu­ca­tional sys­tem in Haiti,” said Marcelo Cabrol, head of the Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank’s edu­ca­tion divi­sion. “We want to be aggressive.”

The prob­lems are mon­u­men­tal: Just one in 10 Hait­ian teach­ers is a qual­i­fied edu­ca­tor, accord­ing to the IADB — and a third have not even com­pleted ninth grade. The gov­ern­ment is unable to sup­port more than a hand­ful of schools, leav­ing the sys­tem dom­i­nated by fly-by-night, for-profit store­front schools whose oner­ous fees and other costs keep half of Haiti’s chil­dren from enrolling at any given time.

Build­ings were so unsafe that one school col­lapsed on its own in 2008, a year and three months before the quake, killing 100 stu­dents and adults.

Wealthy Haitians and for­eign­ers opt out entirely, putting their chil­dren in upscale schools that cost some $8,000 per year — more than most Haitians will spend on food and basic neces­si­ties in 20 years.

Before the earth­quake, Asso­ci­ated Press jour­nal­ists vis­ited class­rooms in rick­ety ware­houses, one with an open-pit toi­let dug along­side the desks. In a pri­vate ele­men­tary school just blocks from the National Palace a teacher slumped in his chair, half asleep, while a teenage stu­dent scrawled rote Cre­ole phrases on a flimsy blackboard.

That school is gone now — one of the more than 3,800 dam­aged or destroyed in the quake. Nearly 4,000 stu­dents, and more than 700 teach­ers, prin­ci­pals and staff were killed dur­ing after­noon classes. All that’s left of the Min­istry of Education’s main build­ing is a crater filled with torn work­books and lost teach­ers’ ID cards.

Edu­ca­tion advo­cates see a chance for a fresh start.

Celebri­ties like Shakira, Nicole Kid­man and Keith Urban have pledged money to rebuild indi­vid­ual schools and promi­nent U.S. edu­ca­tors are vol­un­teer­ing to help restruc­ture the system.

Paul Val­las, a for­mer Chicago and Philadel­phia super­in­ten­dent work­ing to rebuild Louisiana’s storm-ravaged Recov­ery School Dis­trict, is work­ing with the IABD, research­ing ways to build hur­ri­cane– and earthquake-resistant build­ings in Haiti and cre­ate a uni­fied Creole-language cur­ricu­lum to improve math, read­ing and other skills.

“We ben­e­fited from the gen­eros­ity of oth­ers and we almost feel there’s an oblig­a­tion for us to the same,” Val­las told The Asso­ci­ated Press in a tele­phone inter­view from New Orleans.

The IADB has also reached out to Teach for Amer­ica founder Wendy Kopp propos­ing a pro­gram for Haiti that would train and employ teach­ers, draw­ing from some of the esti­mated 35,000 uni­ver­sity stu­dents who lost their class­rooms, as well as Hait­ian dias­pora and oth­ers overseas.

Edu­ca­tion offi­cials know they have lim­ited time to act. The edu­ca­tion min­istry is eye­ing an early April return.

“A coun­try can’t func­tion with­out edu­ca­tion. We can’t have our chil­dren in the streets,” said Laguerre, who attended Catholic schools in Haiti and earned advanced degrees in Paris and Montreal.

Before schools can open, how­ever, offi­cials want to assess build­ings, while locat­ing tents, food for stu­dents, finan­cial sup­port for teach­ers and psy­cho­log­i­cal coun­sel­ing for stu­dents affected by the quake, said edu­ca­tion min­istry direc­tor gen­eral Pierre Michel Laguerre.

Some aid groups are run­ning school-like pro­grams. Israeli and Hait­ian vol­un­teers teach basic lessons like hygiene and count­ing in the sprawl­ing makeshift camp behind the U.S. Army 82nd Air­borne base in Petionville, but orga­niz­ers say it is a tem­po­rary program.

On Mon­day a Catholic school in Petionville reopened for a cou­ple hours to teach stu­dents earth­quake pre­pared­ness and pro­vide psy­cho­log­i­cal coun­sel­ing, but reg­u­lar lessons will not resume until the gov­ern­ment reopens its schools, teach­ers said.

For most like Delomme, the long inter­rup­tion piles stress onto an already cat­a­strophic sit­u­a­tion. School lunch is often the only nutri­tion her kids get in a day.

“The schools remain the only sec­tor that is still closed. The banks reopened, the mar­kets are open­ing, trans­porta­tion is func­tion­ing again,” said Charles Tardieu, a for­mer edu­ca­tion min­is­ter and mem­ber of the com­mit­tee that peti­tioned Preval’s office.

Its mem­bers agree that reform is nec­es­sary, but argue that reopen­ing schools can’t wait for ingrained prob­lems to be solved. “If this is the sit­u­a­tion, you’re not going to be open­ing the schools for the next 10 years,” he said.

Delomme, who never com­pleted ele­men­tary school, had man­aged against the odds to keep her kids in school. Fees were a strug­gle, classes were lousy and teach­ers often didn’t show up, but it meant every­thing to the 41-year-old mom who wanted to give them the chance she never had.

With no radio or elec­tric­ity for a tele­vi­sion under the family’s musty tarps, her only infor­ma­tion about school comes from con­flict­ing rumors about when classes might begin. She hopes word that it won’t be much longer is true.

“All I can give them is an edu­ca­tion,” she said.

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