THE 'HOTEL KIDS': A GROWING SCHOOL PROBLEM

Angel Rivera, 10 years old and slight of voice, was trying to explain.

He was standing in what was once a ballroom at the Hotel Martinique in midtown Manhattan, a cavernous room with broken mirrors and gaping holes where chandeliers used to be, saying he really did want to go to school. But he had already been to two schools since his mother's Bronx apartment burned out last summer and was upset by the thought of starting over in yet another school.

''I don't like going to new schools,'' he told Cecilio Diaz, a school official who was trying to help. ''I get shy in the class.''

'A Losing Battle'

Angel and the other children at the Hotel Martinique and similar facilities are known as hotel kids. They are the children of people who are without homes because of fires, evictions or other emergencies, and never have their numbers been so great, according the city's crisis intervention unit.

There are so many displaced children now that officials of the Board of Education have set up makeshift offices in the Martinique and other welfare hotels to help them - but are finding it impossible to keep pace with the problem.

''This is a losing battle,'' said Mr. Diaz, who uses a plasticcovered table in the old ballroom as his office. ''It's like a river. The water keeps flowing. The situation is impossible.''

The same day that Angel spoke to him, Mr. Diaz, coordinator of the board's Office of Pupil Personnel Services, took the sixth grader to Intermediate School 70 on West 17th Street and registered him in class 6-6. And a week later, Angel had to begin again at yet a fourth school. His family had moved back to the Bronx.