There were hallway lines, laughter and learning happening at Poole Elementary in Paulding County on Tuesday, four days after a powerful tornado plowed through the area.
As terrible as the tornado was — it damaged more than 160 buildings in the county — Poole didn’t miss a beat. Teaching materials and equipment were water-damaged and eight classes had to be shifted to new rooms, but school opened on time Monday morning.
In monitoring the storm and responding to the damage it wreaked, school and district officials relied on their extensive emergency preparedness plans.
While Poole’s experience represents a community sigh of relief, it also serves as a reminder of the awful power of nature and as a thunderhead-dark warning: Tornado season is here, and school districts across the state need to make sure their emergency plans aren’t simply dusty binders on a high shelf.
Schools and districts are required by state law to have emergency preparedness plans that must be updated each year. The plans cover everything from information sharing and drills to evacuation and relocation.
“We have to go over all of the what-ifs,” said Sharon Vaughn, principal at Ringgold High in North Georgia’s Catoosa County, which was heavily damaged by a tornado in April. “And you can’t ever say that what-if can’t happen.”
Vaughn knows all about those what-ifs. Her students had to finish the school year at a rival high school and graduation exercises were held in Chattanooga, 17 miles away.
In addition to spelling out where students from a damaged school would be taught, emergency plans also cover portable classrooms used in some crowded districts.
Parents whose children are taught in portable classrooms should know that those children are brought into the main school building as soon as bad weather threatens. When a warning is issued, students are lined up against an interior hallway wall and instructed to cover their heads.
“In both Ringgold and at Poole Elementary, what I heard was that, if the students were in those buildings [when the tornado hit], they would have been in the hallway and they would have been safe,” Jackson said. “Even in Ringgold. Maybe they wouldn’t have been safe in a classroom, but they wouldn’t have been in a classroom.”
Regional building codes dictate how structures like schools and portable classrooms should be built to withstand threats like thunderstorms, tornadoes and fires.
Those codes vary throughout Georgia, and districts can raise the wind speed threshold their buildings must be built to withstand based on local codes and their own assessments of risk.
Portable classrooms in Fulton County, for example, must be built to withstand winds of up to 120 mph. Portables in Cherokee County have to be able to withstand winds of 110 to 130 mph. Portables used by Atlanta Public Schools and Gwinnett County must be able to withstand winds of up to 90 mph.
Vaughn said the state does an excellent job in making sure schools carry out drills and update their emergency preparedness plans each year.
Still, when she drives by a newer school, she worries.
“The only thing I’d say is let’s look at these floor-to-ceiling windows and multiple stories,” Vaughn said.
Poole has no showy architecture. It is row upon row of brick — and yet it did not come through Friday’s tornado unscathed.
Poole’s students could have been sent to nearby Ragsdale Elementary if Poole was determined to be unsafe for children, said David Colvard, executive director of safety and athletics for the Paulding County School District.
Before the tornado hit, Colvard and his colleagues had been monitoring the weather all day, sending text messages to principals in the district to give them updates on what they were hearing about conditions.
School officials say improvements in meteorology and technology make it easier for them to pinpoint the time when a tornado might strike and get word to worried parents.
After a massive cleanup job spearheaded by 35 to 40 district maintenance workers, and after a structural engineer had deemed the building to be safe, Poole principal Angie Capobianco sent parents a recorded message: School would be held on Monday.
Emily Moon, who has two children at Poole, did not expect to get that message. She had driven by the school on Saturday and saw the damage.
“I did not think they were going to have school on that Monday or during that week at all,” Moon said.
Class was held as usual last week, but somewhere behind a closed door, behind a wall where a Cat in the Hat poster stood guard, work crews were quietly repairing damage. A wing of the school remains closed, and a white cover marks the section of roof that was ripped away by the tornado’s winds. Outside, earth movers worked a stretch of land across the street.
Poole’s cleanup won’t take nearly as long as it is taking in Ringgold, where construction crews are still working on the football stadium a year later to get it ready for graduation in late May.
The school has been repaired and open this school year. Still, the memory of last year’s tornado is painfully fresh.
As the storm that produced the Paulding tornado threatened Catoosa County, Vaughn and district officials there decided to close the school early.
“If a bomb’s going to hit, you wouldn’t have all the children in one place,” Vaughn said.
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