Mixed signals are coming from City Hall and Haitian families with relatives fleeing the chaos and deprivation caused by the devastating earthquake in the Caribbean country.

While the Michael Bloomberg Administration is giving an iron-clad assurance that it is moving aggressively to find classroom accommodation for youthful earthquake victims, Haitians are complaining the process is moving too slowly.

Dennis Walcott, the City's Deputy Mayor for Education and Community Development, insists the road is being cleared for Haitian students seeking entry into the public schools, the nation's largest system.

"Our school system absorbs children and does it very well," he told the Carib News. "When it comes to our school children, that's not a challenge at all. From a point of City policy, our Immigrant Affairs Commissioner [Fatima Shama] is working with folks and has been very out-front. We work with a number of leaders in the Haitian community making it clear that the City is going to be supportive of any child or adult who comes over here."

In short, Walcott said, the Department of Education and City Hall were preparing for any influx of Haitian youngsters who are joining relatives after enduring the nightmare of demolished buildings, especially classrooms in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding communities. More than 200,000 Haitians died in the January 12th earthquake that also left at least 500,000 homeless when it struck the capital. It is estimated that more than half of the school buildings were flattened.

"We are moving quickly to accommodate them," the Deputy Mayor said.

But the New York Immigration Coalition, Advocates for Children, the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, students and parents are impatient with what they see as the snail's pace and the traditional barriers that are impeding the children's access to the classroom.

"Over a dozen families in the City's Haitian community have received school-aged relatives fleeing Haiti's earthquake, and more are expected," the Coalition, an umbrella organization of immigrant groups in the City, said in a statement. "But these families are encountering longstanding barriers to enrolling these children in school. It's taking between three to six weeks to find a spot for these children, when it should take no more than a week by law."

The Coalition was quick to insist that Haitians were running into serious obstacles in getting "spots for children arriving in the middle of the school year. It was even harder when they need help learning English or need literacy support." Brooklyn has the largest concentration of Haitians in the City and parents in the borough complain they are experiencing the most serious problems and delays. But Department of Education officials say the complaints reflect a certain impatience that doesn't take the complex situation into consideration.

"A complaint is that it's taking between three to six weeks to get spots in schools," a Department aide said. "But that's difficult to fathom when the earthquake occurred exactly six weeks ago. What that would mean is that the children began arriving the day after the earthquake struck when there were no flights out of Haiti and the dimensions of the tragedy were then becoming clear. We are moving aggressively to deal with the situation and given an assurance that the children will be placed, no questions asked."

Looking at the overall picture of all immigrant children entering the school system, Walcott said in an interview that the Administration was "trying to create schools in various communities that would attract immigrant populations and make them a part of what's going on. There are our language translation services that are making sure that they are accessible to people right away. We are acting in a variety of ways, making sure that the children who are immigrants are part of the mainstream and not feeling isolated."