Responsibility2nd: “To go home only to be killed or injured as that F5 ripped the house apart?”
That is the parent’s decision to make, not the schools.
If you don’t live here, you don’t probably understand exactly how accurate tornado tracking is in Oklahoma City. We were about 2 miles from it and watched it as it went past. Why didn’t we run to shelter? Because the news was reporting its exact location (confirmed by our own observations).
Unless one is right in the path of these things, the risk of injury or destruction is virtually nil. With as accurate as the news is, it’s possible to simply drive a mile or two out of the tornado’s path. Although that’s not wise in most cases, it’s probably better than trying to hunker down in a structure that’s directly in the path of a F-5 tornado.
Bottom line: parents should have the ultimate authority and responsibility for their children. It’s their decision to make.
Wrong. As someone else upthread pointed out - there was no time to send for the busses and no point to send kids to an empty home.
You claim this was the parents decision, not the schools. Wrong again. This was an urgent split-second decision. And as long as the children are at school, the responsibility for their safety belongs to the school staff. Certainly if a parent showed up before the tornado to take little Billy home, then fine. But since the kids and their parents had no choice, then I appreicate the decisions officials made.
I’m guessing that more little lives would have been lost if these hundreds of children were just “sent home”.
Amen! Does anyone think those children wouldn’t have felt safer with their parents? Were they crying for their teachers, or their mothers? If they were doomed anyway by the tornado’s path, better they would have been in their homes. I can’t imagine being their parents now. The school year is over, there should have been NO SCHOOL in light of the forecast from the night before for more tornados. Poor babies, poor parents. Those children might not have been safer in their homes,but every one of them wished they were. Just pray for them all, and pray that they learn from this and it never happens again.