New Bedford leaders are livid at Hillary Clinton’s depiction of the Whaling City as a place where handicapped children were abandoned at home because the schools lacked accommodations for youngsters with special needs.

“It’s not true,” former Mayor Jack Markey told the Herald yesterday. “I’m even a Democrat, but the truth is the truth.

“We would take handicapped kids in a small van to schools that could take them,” said Markey, who served on a local board that helped disabled children before he was elected mayor in 1971. “I would have been aware of a child needing help to go to school. The truth is we ?had access.”

Clinton, in her speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president Thursday night, recalled working for the Children’s Defense Fund in New Bedford in 1973, looking into why 2 million kids were reported as not going to school nationwide.

“I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house,” Clinton said. “She told me how badly she wanted to go to school — it just didn’t seem possible in ?those days.”

Campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin said last night “Clinton went door-to-door in a New Bedford neighborhood with a large Portuguese and Cape Verdean population and found disabled school-age children who felt that it was impossible for them to ?attend school.”

But the story has shocked numerous New Bedford officials who ran the city and school ?system then.

Joseph Silva, a retired superintendent of New Bedford Schools and principal of Ingraham Elementary School when the Children’s Defense Fund investigators combed through the city in 1973, said the girl in Clinton’s story would have had the option of being transported to an accessible school.

“Kids weren’t left to flounder,” Silva said. “That’s been historically the culture in New Bedford that the needs that children ?had were met in whatever ways necessary.”

In 1973, many New Bedford schools were not handicap accessible — which would have kept some disabled children from attending their neighborhood school. But the city accommodated these kids by transporting them to other schools that were outfitted to their needs, a practice that continues today, according to a school official.

The October 1974 report from the Children’s Defense Fund found high rates of New Bedford kids not attending school, but it didn’t mention transportation issues for the city’s disabled children — and it did not relate Clinton’s back-porch anecdote.

Lawrence Finnerty, a current member of the New Bedford school committee who was in his second year teaching in 1973, remembered the district’s ?accommodation for handicapped children.

“There’s a history down here of taking care of our kids, and we did,” Finnerty said, wishing for more information about the child. “Who told her she couldn’t attend?”

Markey, 81, said he wanted people to know how New Bedford cared for its kids.

“I just want to let the people know the facts. It’s not true! Truth is not in the past. The truth is ?the truth.”