Some parents, heartsick about their own losses and frustrated in their dealings with insurance companies, utilities and government officials, were quickly beguiled by St. Patrick’s intimate sense of community. Megan Doherty, 36, a mother of three, recalled how her two-story house in Breezy Point had been swamped by a tide that reached four feet up the first floor, forcing the family to gut the building.

“We didn’t know where to go or what to do,” she said.

Her family moved in with an aunt in Bay Ridge, where she had grown up. Though she believed that P.S./M.S. 114 was an exceptional school, it closed for a month. St. Patrick restored the comfortable routines of school for her sons, Aidan, 9, and Nolan, 5.

“It’s a saving grace they took us in,” Ms. Doherty said, wiping away tears. “They opened their doors. They waived tuition. They donated uniforms. Now the boys are very happy.”

When classmates ask her sons what happened, she said, “they tell them water washed away everything.” But she likes to tell her children: “Home is not a building. It’s where we are, with Mommy and Daddy.”

St. Patrick has taken the extra students in stride, Ms. D’Emic said, with longtime Catholic school parents helping to register shellshocked families and teachers whose classrooms would now be more crammed offering nothing but welcome.

“It was a very emotional morning for all of us,” Ms. D’Emic said of the first school day after the storm. “Children of all ages had lost their homes, their schools, were living with relatives, with just the clothing on their backs, and they were starting a new school. By 9:15 we had every child in a class. When the children were settled in, some parents burst into tears.”

Guidance counselors were assigned. As Msgr. Jamie J. Gigantiello, the diocese’s vicar for development, pointed out, “Some of the children feel they can’t break down before their parents.” Still, for the parents it was a relief to see at least one aspect of their lives return to something approaching normal.