Students leave their school with its cyclone-damaged roof, windows and walls Monday in Thuwana, Myanmar. Schools reopened Monday with many in and around Yangon still bearing scars from the May 2-3 cyclone that left at least 134,000 people dead or missing.

Thuwana, Myanmar ? As students filed into Middle School No. 1 on Monday for the first day of classes since the cyclone hit Myanmar a month ago, all eyes stared skyward – at the gaping hole in the roof.

The school in Thuwana, a southern suburb of Yangon, was one of at least 4,100 that were damaged or destroyed by Cyclone Nargis, according to UNICEF.

The May 2-3 storm struck during the summer break, which runs until the end of May. The government delayed the June 2 start of the new term for a number of schools in the worst-hit areas of the Irrawaddy delta, where entire villages were wiped off the map.

But most schools reopened on schedule Monday in and around Yangon, despite the concerns of some teachers, parents and international aid groups about safety risks to students.

Meanwhile, aid groups continued to complain that a month after the cyclone hit a million survivors are still without basic relief.

The groups say they still faced government delays in sending disaster experts and vital equipment into the country. The hurdles have resulted in only a trickle of the necessary aid reaching the storm’s estimated 2.4 million survivors.

“People need basic relief, which is shocking after four weeks,” Oxfam regional director Sarah Ireland said Monday.

The United Nations has also been critical of the access to the needy by aid groups.

“There remains a serious lack of sufficient and sustained humanitarian assistance for the affected populations,” the United Nations said in its latest assessment report. It said the world body also lacked “a clear understanding of the support being provided by the Government of Myanmar to its people.”

At Middle School No. 1, classes resumed in a building where strips of rusted corrugated iron roofing hung precariously overhead. The storm’s winds shattered windows and punched holes in the school’s flimsy walls, and, according to one teacher, knocked the building off its foundations, so it will eventually have to be rebuilt.

“I am worried about the rain. If the rains get inside the school, the children will get sick,” said San Aye, the mother of a 12-year-old.

Still, she said she supported the decision to start school because she thought any delay would hurt the students academically – a widespread concern in a country where education is highly valued and primary school enrollment rate is 82 percent for both boys and girls, according to UNICEF.

But Khin Yir, a teacher from the northern Yangon suburb of Hlaing Thar Yar, said she believed it was a “bad choice” to reopen schools so soon.

The storm’s 120 mph winds ripped the roofs off two of the three buildings at her junior high and driving rains caused widespread flooding, she said. She asked that the school not be named for fear of government reprisals for talking to a reporter.

“We teachers tried to salvage what we could, but the rain damaged everything,” she said.