High Risk Days: Should Schools Be Closed

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

Before I saw this thread I had been thinking the exact same thing, 'Closing schools on high risk days'. I am not saying it would fix all the problems, but it might not be a bad idea to consider. When I was in middle school years ago, we had a storm with a confirmed tornado about 20 miles away heading towards the school. It was the exact same time school got out, so the teachers and admin tried to run everyone home as fast as they could. My bus never came till 30 mins after everyone else had left (cause i lived in the country). They kept trying to get me to leave and I had to tell them that I would just be standing outside the school for 30 mins anyways. The storm died before getting to close to town, but it was an interesting approach to try and run us off so they would not have liablity if we got hurt. Truthfully i would have rather been outside so i would have atleast had a chance to see it.

I hated nothing more when i was back in school than doing tornado drills. There has to be better saftey percautions that can be taken than going into a hallway and putting a book over your head. The hallways almost always still have glass somewhere around them. Also, I never felt the buildings i was in at school were every that strong anyways. Schools should have to have rooms scattered through the building that are "safe" rooms or atleast something better than hallways.

 

[Patrick Martin]

I know I'm a bit late on this, but my no vote was an easy one.

Closing a school in a high risk area does not put people in any less danger. If it hit an office building, do we stop working? If the tornado struck a supermarket instead of a school, should grocery stores close on high risk days? What about mod or slight risk days? Are there not fatalities on slight and mod risk days as well? Let's be honest, if we close schools, businesses or whatever, those same people are still in the slight/mod/high risk area, which means that the statistical odds of them being impacted by severe weather has not changed. If school was let out, and all the kids went straight home (yeah right!) and then the tornado rolled through one of the neighborhoods (which IMO is more likely since residential areas cover significantly more area than schools), and 8 of the students died, people would be screaming that school should have never been let out.

Really, like others before stated and explained, it comes down to being prepared and educated. Prime example...2yrs ago the building "management" evacuated all the tenants of our 12 floor office building to the center stairwells during a tornado warning. Although it was very safe, the only thing we were being kept safe from was the sunshine coming through the windows as the warning was for a storm 15 miles NE of our location (that was never near us) that was moving AWAY. All they heard was "Denver County" and panicked. I've also seen this same "management" team bungle the definitions of t-storm & tor watch and warning on posters they put up in the building.

 

[Justin Turcotte]

Well-built schools should not close. An interior room in one of them is about as safe as it gets aside from being underground.

Let the rugrats out at the wrong time and you end up with this (text from TornadoProject):

Belvidere High School [was struck by a tornado on April 21, 1967] while high school students were boarding sixteen buses already containing elementary school students. Twelve of the buses were overturned or thrown. One bus driver was killed, but most of the dead [13 total at the school]were students, who were "tossed like leaves" into adjacent fields. Students and teachers used school doors and plywood from nearby houses as stretchers for the injured students, of which there were 300. There was near F4 damage to homes nearby. South of Harvard, a school bus was ripped in half and thrown into power lines as the driver and 20 students hid in a ditch.

 

[SteveCarter]

Flat out...no. An example of why not to close school all day was Enterprise, AL. I know....you would think this would be a good reason why it SHOULD have been closed, but here's the reason. Around 65% of the students in that area lived in mobile homes. Most parents would have left the kids home alone, if they were old enough, and they would NOT have stayed home. Also, it was the school that screwed up, by not having them in a safer place. If you close school every time there is a severe WATCH, you will very quickly begin to be the "boy who cried wolf". People will start to ignore ALL watches, then warnings, as being over exaggerated. If you keep the schools open, and provide a SAFE place for the students, this works better than any other plan out there. Enterprise made one mistake after the other>>>dismissing school JUST before the tornado hit, then not providing any safe place for them to be. Sometimes the one in charge needs to be more aware of what is actually happening.

 

[Jim Placzek]

I had to pick this topic for my first post. I certainly voted no. I was attending high school in Omaha on May 6, 1975. Omaha was hit by an F4 about 4:30 p.m. My private high school decided on an early dismissal of 1:30 pm. All this did was send the buses out in golf ball sized hail as several T-storms crossed Omaha during the afternoon before the tornadic storm arrived on the dry-line. I would have taken my chances in the school which btw the first floor is mostly below ground than have a tornado kill 60 on a schoolbus.

Do we have any guarantees that high-school age kids are going to stay home if school is closed, let's be real. Maybe we should tell people to leave their mobile homes on high-risk days because mobile homes are hit more often than schools.

 

[Scott A. Kampas]