TONGA – As Cyclone Gita roared across Tonga last week it destroyed government buildings, churches and private homes – it also smashed the island’s schools and has sabotaged the immediate education prospects of hundreds of Tongan children.

Fifteen-year-old student Senolita arrived at her Nuku‘alofa school on Monday to find part of its roof gone and her classroom strewn with soggy books, broken sports trophies, and a smashed globe of the world.

It was the first time she had been back since Cyclone Gita ravaged Tonga a week earlier.

The Queen Salote College student had been busy fixing her home and dealing with the death of her uncle, who died of an illness the day after the category four storm struck.

She said he had been en route to hospital to be with him, but didn’t make it because the roads were too clogged with debris to get through.

Now she wants to get back to her studies, but finding a classroom fit for students in post-cyclone Tonga will be a challenge.

Education experts in the country are worried Cyclone Gita has done more than trash buildings – it could also cripple Tongan students’ schooling.

Kathryn Smith-Tupau, the principal of ACTS Community School in Nuku‘alofa, said some schools planned to stay closed for Term One while they were being rebuilt– but she fears others would “just shut”.

Because few schools used computers in Tonga, much of their record keeping and documents would have been saturated and destroyed during the storm.

Even if schools managed to open, Smith-Tupau believed many students would likely be kept home to help clean up or babysit younger siblings.

“Those ones might not come back, so the cyclone’s impact on learning will just be devastating,” she said.

Her own school had been severely damaged and one week after the storm its remains were still surrounded by fetid floodwater – an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos carrying dengue fever.

It had lost most of its roof, some of its walls, and had been inundated with rain.

Floods rose high enough and stayed long enough to warp the ground floor doors.

A shipping container of donated school furniture had arrived from New Zealand just before the storm, most of which had also warped in floodwaters.

The area was not safe for students, but Smith-Tupau said she was determined the school’s 320 pupils would keep studying. She had arranged for lessons to be split between private homes around Nuku‘alofa, starting on Wednesday.

Chairman of the school’s board of trustees, Mataele Fusitu‘a, said the buildings were beyond repair and would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

The first task, however, was to access one of the country’s few pumps and get rid of the water.

“We’re worried about dengue,” he said. “There’s nothing much we can do at the moment though except hope the little fishes eat the mosquito larvae.”

In the east of the main island of Tongatapu, what still stood of Tapau Nisiliva School looks like something from a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film.

Test-tubes, magnifying glasses and bottles of chemicals were scattered around its science lab, covered in a soggy layer of grime. Pieces of ceiling dangled from lighting cables beneath an open sky.

The roofing iron and walls of some of its classrooms still hang from trees they had blown into behind the school property.

Next to the school buildings, the principal’s house – home to a family of five last week – is equally damaged.

The school’s students have been offered space at Toupo High School, a 30-minute drive away in Nuku‘alofa.

Despite losing part of its roof, Toupo High School is less structurally damaged than other schools and bustled with life on Monday.

Teachers directed students – girls in blue tunics, boys in blue lavalava – in a large scale clean-up operation. They swept debris, moved desks from where they had been safely stacked to still-intact classrooms, and attempted to salvage wet books.

No one was sure when lessons would start again.

Tongan-born MP Jenny Salesa was in Tonga on a private trip the week after the cyclone and said she “intended to have discussions” with New Zealand’s Ministry of Education about the state of the island’s schools.

“These are schools with hardly any resources to begin with,” she said. “It’s just heartbreaking knowing how long they will take to repair.”

Salesa said she understood around 40 per cent of schools had been seriously damaged during Cyclone Gita.

According to government statistics from 2012, there were 17,000 primary school and 15,000 secondary school students in Tonga.

- Stuff