OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy — a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student — that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.

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Librado Romero/The New York Times

Eager students in Ashlyn Fields’s second-grade class.

In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.

Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school’s social worker, literally carried him to the principal’s office, where he again crawled under a chair.

“It looks like he needs all three squishies,” Tynisha Wynder, Haven’s behavior specialist, said to Ms. Nauiokas, who promptly turned around with two more.

Marquis slowly came out from under the chair, moving to slouch in his seat while fiddling with the squishy. He quieted down and hung his head, seemingly ashamed.

Every school has trouble with tantrums, but at Haven Academy, devising tactics to recover from them is a central part of the mission. Opened in the fall of 2008 by the New York Foundling, a 140-year-old foster care agency, Haven is the first school in the city designed to serve children from broken families. A third of its students are in foster care, and another third are under the watch of the Administration for Children’s Services (the remainder come from the surrounding Mott Haven neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country).

Foster children are among the hardest to educate and are more prone to be placed in special-education classrooms. Not only have they often been abused or abandoned, but many are also academically transient, sometimes starting over with new teachers and new friends in new schools multiple times a year.

So Haven, which as a charter school is publicly financed but privately managed, has on its staff a behavior specialist, a social worker, a special-education expert and an operations manager who coordinates transportation, along with two teachers in each classroom. They are, at times, akin to detectives, monitoring to see which children might be attacking their free breakfasts a little too hungrily, searching the hallways for signs that something might be amiss at home. The school has also budgeted $65,000 extra for transportation, promising to keep children enrolled even if they change addresses. This year, the school is relying on $250,000 in donations for the additional services.

“Because they present so many behavioral issues, these kids have kind of fallen through the black hole in public schools in big-city areas, and they need an awful lot of things,” said Bill Baccaglini, the executive director of the New York Foundling. “You want to talk about academic success, but my kids don’t show up ready for the three R’s. There’s no amount of math that a kid can be ready for if you saw your mother beaten, if you were beaten or if you are constantly dealing with turmoil.”

City officials say that nearly 10,000 foster children attend New York public schools, about a third of them in the Bronx. Haven, which has two classes each of kindergarten and first and second grades, plans to eventually enroll 300 students up to eighth grade.

Marquis and his twin brother, Maurice, were abandoned by their mother shortly after they were born, and live with an uncle (the school asked that students’ last names not be published). Both boys started at the school last year but were so far behind socially and academically that they are repeating kindergarten. Marquis, in particular, has trouble paying attention in class.

“It’s O.K. to be upset, but you have to use your words,” Ms. Wynder, the behavior specialist, said the morning of the chair-throwing. “Your uncle is not going to be happy to hear about today. He likes to know when you have a really good day, and this is not one of those.”

The uncle said that Haven had called as often as once a week to report that one or both of the boys had acted out. He is grateful: His sons, who are older, could cut class for days on end without his hearing about it, he said.

Marquis simply nodded when Ms. Wynder reminded him that she would have to call home. A few moments later, he began to write a note of apology to his teachers, one hand holding his pencil, the other tugging at the squishy in his lap.

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