8 Months Later, Deaths of Students Still Rock Close-Knit N.Y. Hamlet : Disaster: A storm tore down a cafeteria wall, killing nine students. Some parents want to forget the disaster. Others can’t, and grief has turned to anger.

NEWBURGH, N.Y. — Peter Orsino’s eyes flash with anger when anyone tells him the death of his 8-year-old son was an act of God.

Peter Orsino Jr. was eating in the cafeteria of the East Coldenham Elementary School last Nov. 16 when a 90-m.p.h. wind demolished a 12-foot cafeteria wall, later shown to be of defective design. Peter and eight other children died in a shower of concrete and glass.

“It wasn’t an act of God,” the boy’s father said, “because God doesn’t make buildings.”

Orsino and several other bereaved parents have channeled their grief and anger into a tenacious effort to get the state to change laws regarding inspections of school buildings. But a top school official said these efforts, and lawsuits filed in the wake of the disaster, have caused bitterness.

Eight months after the storm clouds lifted, this close-knit rural hamlet 50 miles north of New York City is divided between those who want to forget the tragedy and those who can’t.

Pictures from that day remain etched in memory: tearful parents rushing up to the school to see if their children were alive or dead.

Sympathy poured in from across the country, and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo attended a memorial service for the nine dead children three days after the disaster.

When the initial shock wore off, parents from seven of the nine families started to meet regularly at the town firehouse. It was a way to talk through their grief, said John Lichtler, whose 7-year-old daughter, Joanna, was killed.

That grief turned to anger when a state report on the disaster concluded that the cafeteria wall, built with the rest of the school in 1959, was not capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds.

“Accidents happen every day, people are hurt and killed,” said Frances Soltis, who lost her 7-year-old son, Adam. “But our children were not out in the street running in front of cars and they weren’t playing with matches. They were eating their lunch in a school cafeteria. They were in a place where they were supposed to be safe.”

In March, the parents of seven East Coldenham victims signed a letter to Cuomo, urging legislative action on school-building safety.

The parents want architects and engineers sent to every school in the state at regular intervals to detect possible dangers. They want blueprints checked to see if others have design flaws similar to East Coldenham’s. Defects were discovered at four other New York schools after the disaster.

The parents’ anger, their continued outspokenness, has not been well received by some of their neighbors.

Bruce Armbrister, who lost his 7-year-old stepson, said he had to restrain himself from attacking one man who told him, “What are you fighting for? You’re going to be a millionaire.”

Armbrister and 32 others--parents of the 24 children who were injured or killed, along with others who say their children were traumatized--have filed negligence lawsuits against the state, Orange County and the school district.

The lawsuits have caused resentment among unaffected parents who wonder what the claims could do to tax bills, said James Coonan, superintendent of the Valley Central School District.

School officials are stuck between two emotional camps, Coonan said.

An incident about three weeks after the disaster typified some of the problems.

While driving one of her three surviving children to East Coldenham to school, Soltis saw the building’s American flag flying at full-staff for the first time since the storm. It was like a “dagger through my heart,” she said.

She lowered the flag to half-staff in the late autumn chill.

The next day, she found the flag at full-staff again. Again, she lowered it.

“They reach a point where they don’t want to confront it anymore,” Soltis said. “I see it in the (other) families. They got through with minimal damage to their family. They survived, so there’s a tendency to block it.

“I don’t expect people to feel what I feel,” she said. “But I expect them to respect my son’s memory and to respect my family’s grief.”

Coonan said no disrespect was intended to storm victims. School officials agreed to keep the flag flying at half-staff for the rest of the school year--drawing phone calls from other parents who complained that it was an unpleasant reminder for their children, he said.

The flag will be flying at full-staff again when school opens in September.

“You get trouble when you go from sad to mad,” Coonan said. “There’s a lot of anger when people lose children, and that anger is kind of out there looking for someplace to land, and it lands on different people at different times. It’s not always pleasant when it happens, but people tell us it’s normal.”

Lichtler leads the effort to change state school inspection laws. A computer programmer at the U.S. Military Academy, he has compiled a bulging file of newspaper stories about shoddy school construction.

The chairman of the Education Committee in the New York state Assembly, Angelo Del Toro, is backing the parents with a bill that would require schools to be inspected once every three years.

Lawmakers did not act on the proposal before recessing for the summer earlier this year, partly because of a last-minute proposal from Cuomo. The governor, concerned about the cost of mandatory inspections, suggested training local school officials to make the inspections themselves.

Although the Valley Central schools all have been inspected, some school districts are concerned about the expense of hiring experts for regular inspections, said Richard Jansen, until recently the school board president.

“Our children should be safe, but there has to be a real rational way of doing it,” Jansen said. “I could see some problems down the road when the expenses would just get bigger and bigger.”

To the bereaved, no price is too high.

Soltis said her three children will go to private school this fall, and Armbrister said he isn’t sure if East Coldenham is safe enough for him to send his daughter to kindergarten there next year.

“We have to feel that our children’s lives amounted to something,” Lichtler said. “If we can save one child, then their lives would have been at least been . . . for a purpose.”