Distraught parents of the students gathered at the high school in Ansan, desperate for news.
TV footage showed a chaotic scene in the school’s auditorium, with parents yelling at school officials and frantically trying to make phone calls to their children.
“I talked to my daughter. She said she had been rescued along with 10 other students,” one mother told the YTN news channel.
“They said they had jumped into the water before getting rescued. One was injured in the leg and is being treated in hospital,” she said.
Lee Gyeong-Og said 34 naval, coastguard and civilian vessels were involved in the rescue operation, along with 18 helicopters.
In a personal message, President Park Geun-Hye “ordered us to make efforts not to leave a single casualty,” he said.
The ferry manifest included 150 cars.
Hundreds of ferries ply the waters between the South Korean mainland and its multiple offshore islands every day, and accidents are relatively rare.
However in one of the worst incidents, nearly 300 people died when a ferry capsized off the western coast in October, 1993.
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