An administrator at a Queens school who allegedly made 13 Haitian-American students eat lunch on the floor without utensils, and called them animals, has been given an emergency safety transfer. The move was decried yesterday by irate members of the City Council, parents, and advocates of the children, who wanted a harsher penalty.

Council members called on the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, to suspend the administrator, Nancy Miller, and her principal, Pauline Shakespeare, at P.S. 34 in Queens Village until – not after – the completion of an investigation by the Department of Education into the March 16 incident. The council members also said the department should make counseling available to the fourth-graders involved.

“Their egos were trampled on by those they were supposed to have the most faith in: the educational administration,” the council member whose district includes P.S. 34, Leroy Comrie, said.

Additional counselors are being sent to the school, according to a department spokesman, Keith Kalb.

The emergency transfer of Ms. Miller comes a day after parents, students and advocates protested outside the school for remarks students said Ms. Miller made to them while they were sitting on the floor, eating their chicken and rice, as other students looked on.

“In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here,” several students recalled the administrator said to them.

Mr. Kalb said the department initiated an investigation immediately after receiving word of the incident March 29. No action will be taken against the administrator until the investigation is complete, at which time the chancellor will meet with the parents of the students, he said.

“If the allegations are true, they are unconscionable,” Mr. Kalb said.

The students’ accounts quickly rippled across the New York Haitian community before catching press attention.

“I was outraged, I had to start something,” the community liaison for the Haitian Centers Council, Gisele Josme, said of her effort to make the issue public. Ms. Josme received the first e-mails from parents of the students the same day the department said it was notified.

News of the incident spread to the Haitian ambassador to America, Raymond Joseph, while he was on a business trip to Miami.

“I deplore this situation, and I wish the city and the Department of Education move rapidly to settle the issues and punish those that need to be punished,” Mr. Joseph said.

Activists said yesterday that the alleged lunchroom trauma was not an isolated incident.

A co-founder of the Independent Commission on Public Education in New York City, Carmen Santana, said students and parents have complained in the past about students’ being forced to stand for an entire lunch hour; being dismissed early from detention but prohibited from returning to school, and being condescended to by some teachers.

A member of another advocacy group, Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence, said the mayor and chancellor should send a letter of apology to the children and establish a $1.56 million college scholarship fund.

The mayor’s office declined to comment on the case, with a spokesman citing the continuing investigation.