She's searching for shoes, too, size 11, so her son can change out of the only pair she salvaged from her Dania Beach apartment after the roof caved in.

''I need them sanitary, nice, neat, how they're used to,'' she said, as she prepared to send her children back to school from the Red Cross shelter at McNicol Middle School in Hollywood.

Jonathan Ward and his sister Kleaster Nesbitt, 8 joined thousands of Broward children preparing for their first day back since Hurricane Wilma. About 150 students are temporarily housed at McNicol while federal and local officials work to find them transitional apartments or trailers, or until their own homes can be repaired.

Putting more than 1,200 school buses back on the road will further complicate the morning commute for everyone in Broward, where more than 60 percent of the traffic signals had not been restored Sunday night. The number of households without power slipped to 133,000 but misery remained, at the shelters and at FEMA recovery centers in Broward and Miami-Dade.

Parents and children lined up outside the shelter on Sunday, rummaging through piles of donated uniforms, socks and underwear. Carmen Reyes is particularly worried about shoes for her three children have been wearing slippers since the hurricane.

Daughter Camisha Reyes, 13, keeps her school clothes in a plastic bag under her cot at the shelter. She lost all of her school books when the water seeped into her Davie apartment, and she is a little concerned about two unfinished book reports.

Young boys crowded around a small television in the Sunshine Pavilion near Florida International University's University Park campus in West Miami-Dade watching their home team take on the Atlanta Falcons.

People trickled into FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers in Miami-Dade and Broward looking for help on everything from a damaged car to destroyed homes.

The DRC centers are staffed with temporary workers such as a part-time CPA and a retired physician assistant. They hail from as far as Washington state and Maryland.

He applied for FEMA assistance on Oct. 25. An inspector told Rosen he had ''maximum damage,'' and he would see a check in the mail in three to five days. Then a FEMA worker told him he would get $800 in rental assistance in his account on Nov. 4.

So far, he has seen no money. ''I'm not only leaving frustrated, but homeless,'' said Rosen, who clutched a manila envelope with receipts for five nights he spent in two motels.

In all, 154,253 Broward residents and 122,010 Miami-Dade residents had registered with FEMA, the latest figures show. About $24 million in grants has been approved in the 13 counties affected by Wilma statewide; of that, $5.5 million is in Broward and $4.8 million in Miami Dade.

Viki Burns of Hollywood, who lost her roof and had cars damaged by falling tree limbs, went to the FEMA center in Plantation over the weekend, after realizing that her personal injury protection insurance won't pay for her crunched cars.

In Miami-Dade, Gwen Smith, an adult education teacher whose North Miami home was nearly destroyed by Wilma, spent an hour Sunday meeting with FEMA representatives at the Joseph Caleb Center in Liberty City -- one of three DRCs set up in Miami-Dade. Smith, 47, learned of the Miami FEMA site through a friend.

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