TACLOBAN, Philippines—Students arriving at Rizal Central School here every morning face a reminder of last year's deadly Typhoon Haiyan: the roughly 1,000 refugees who are taking shelter in the school.
Laundry is draped on metal grilles while cooking is done over small stoves on the floor. Some evacuees, who occupy two of the school's four classroom blocks, go shirtless, drink alcohol and smoke on campus, parents say. Students are crammed into classroom blocks separated from evacuee areas by metal gates and a temporary wall of corrugated sheet metal. Evacuees say parents hurl abuse at them.
"We don't have enough classrooms to conduct our lessons," says Angelo C. Renaranda, a teacher who says evacuees have also damaged chairs and tables and used books for firewood. "We still have sympathy" for refugees, he says, "but what we want to tell them is, please help us also—don't throw garbage, don't disturb our classes and damage our school."
The uneasy relations at Rizal Central are emblematic of one of the biggest challenges as Tacloban and other coastal cities try to recover from Haiyan, which killed more than 6,200 people and displaced more than four million others when it tore across the Philippines in November.
Roughly 80% of the city's pretyphoon student population of 52,000 has resumed classes since schools reopened Jan. 6. But many schools remain in rough shape. About 800 classrooms were partially damaged or destroyed. Storm waters washed away textbooks, classroom furniture and computers.
Seven of the city's 54 public schools continue to double as evacuation centers, with roughly 6,000 students affected, according to Che Che Tamayo, an education official.
Nearly 4,000 evacuees from 941 families were living in schools in Tacloban as of Jan. 28, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
"It's really hard to live here," says Melinda Erandio, a 49-year-old taking shelter in Rizal Central with her husband and three children. "There's no privacy, and parents of the schoolchildren would give us dirty looks, saying we're only living here to get free relief handouts. We wouldn't have asked for this if our home wasn't destroyed," she says.