School Bullying Council

Sue Ogrocki / AP

A child calls to his father after being pulled from the rubble of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., on Monday.

When the sirens began blaring and teachers at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., heard that a monstrous tornado was roaring toward their 57-year-old school and its youngest students, there was nowhere to hide.

They crouched in hallways and bathrooms, waiting, hoping and praying. Then “the school started coming apart,” one neighbor who sought shelter at the school told the Associated Press. A teacher told NBC station KFOR that she draped herself on top of six children in a bathroom to shelter them.

The massive twister scored a direct hit at 3 p.m. (4 p.m. ET), tearing off the roof of the mostly one-story public school, a cinder-block building that had no chance of withstanding shrieking winds that may have topped 200 mph — the powerful outer edge of what the National Weather Service said was at least an EF4 tornado, the second-most-powerful rating.

KFOR television reporter Jesse Wells reports Plaza Towers Elementary school was totally destroyed. Most of the walls of the school have collapsed, and cars were thrown into the front of the building. Emergency crews continue to look for kids who may still be inside.

By Tuesday morning, the death toll at the school stood at seven. Officials said the children drowned in a pool of water at the decimated school. Rescuers were continuing to dig through the school’s rubble, from which several children were pulled out alive Monday evening.

It’s unclear if any other children were killed or trapped alive.

Hysterical parents who had converged on the sprawling pile of broken concrete and twisted metal were later taken to a church to await word on the fate of their youngsters.

The two-mile-wide tornado wiped out entire city blocks of Moore, the hardest-hit Oklahoma City suburb, killing at least 24 people, the state medical examiner office confirmed. Many of the dead are children.

Exactly what transpired at Plaza Towers in the minutes before the tornado unleashed its destructive power has yet to be described. School officials evacuated fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders to a church about a quarter-mile away before it touched down, but the younger students – kindergartners through third graders – remained at the 440-student school, according to KFOR in Oklahoma City. It was not immediately known why school officials divided the students.

BING / Microsoft Corp., Steve Gooch / AP

Before and after aerial photos of Plaza Towers Elementary School.

But Mayer Nudell, a security and safety consultant, did not fault the decision to ride out the storm at the school.

“For something like a tornado, it’s fairly academic,” he said of the options that school officials would have had once the sirens began. “You don’t go out, and you don’t have much warning.”

Despite the carnage at the school, “shelter in place” has emerged as a staple of disaster planning and the strategy of choice for a range of emergencies, including tornadoes. And studies show it has a good track record of saving lives.

On May 3, 1999, for example, when another monster tornado roared through Moore, some 300 students and their parents were attending an awards ceremony in the West Moore High School auditorium. Though the twister badly damaged the school and tossed 150 cars in the parking lot like tinker-toys, those who hunkered down in the school’s hallways suffered only a few superficial injuries.

But there are experts who say that having a large number of people crowded into a big building is a bad idea when maximum-force tornadoes are sweeping through an area.

Chief among them is Joe R. Eagleman, a professor emeritus of the University of Kansas and author of “Severe and Unusual Weather,” a meteorology standard since it was first published in 1983.

He agrees that there was likely insufficient time between the first warning and the time the tornado hit the school, constructed in 1966, for Plaza Towers administrators to consider sending students home. “If time is short, being caught out in the open is not good,” he said.

But he said dispersing the students to their homes would have improved their odds.

“If there is sufficient warning time, the homes would be typically safer because they are smaller buildings and offer more opportunity to get in a downwind corner of the likely approach,” he said.

Eagleman is widely credited with debunking what was the prevailing school of thought on tornadoes for much of the last century: that the safest spot to take shelter is the southwest corner of a building. The reasoning behind the fallacy was that, since most U.S. tornadoes travel from west-southwest to the east-northeast, a twister would hurl debris into the northeast corner of whatever building it hit, likely taking out anyone cowering there.

Witness Michael Welch captures dramatic video of a twister from a KFC parking lot in Newcastle, Oklahoma.

But Eagleman conducted an extensive study after an EF5 tornado hit Topeka, Kan., in 1966, and found that the southwest corner – the direction from which a tornado was most likely to approach – was in fact the most dangerous area to hide.

“It used to be a rule that the southwest corner was the safest, no questions asked, but it was not based on any data,” he said.

Once Plaza Towers officials made the decision to have the students and teachers shelter in place, the school’s disaster plan would have kicked in. The staff and student body would likely have been well-coached, given the school’s location in “Tornado Alley” and Moore’s history of destructive tornadoes, though Eagleman noted that “it varies all over the place as to what the planning has been for severe storms.”

In any case, students would have been moved into a hallway or small room away from the southwest corner of the building and any windows and instructed to either sit or crouch.

“You want a place that is structurally secure, without windows, so you don’t have to worry about flying glass,” said Nudell, who also is an adjunct professor of security management at Webster University in Webster Groves, Mo., and co-author of “The Handbook for Effective Emergency and Crisis Management.”

Both men said the school’s construction would have been important to its ability to withstand a powerful twister.

“The buildings that are made of reinforced concrete are typically very sturdy,” Eagleman said. “Those made with concrete blocks are not.”

But given the destruction visible after the tornado swept through Moore, it’s possible that no building would have withstood the intense pressure that the tornado brought to bear on the building, Nudell said.

Nudell also cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the emergency planning or safety of the school.

“When you get a tornado like the one that it sounds like hit Oklahoma, sometimes all the preparation and planning in the world doesn’t help you,” he said.

NBC News’ Erin McClam and Tracy Connor contributed to this report.

Related stories: 

• Monster tornado tears through Oklahoma
• Six of the worst tornadoes in US history
• Full coverage of Oklahoma tornadoes from NBC News

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It’s prom season in Birmingham, Alabama, and this year some senior citizens are joining the high school seniors. Here, Earnestine Thomas waits to get her hair done on Friday for her Class of 1963 prom.

When Earnestine Thomas was a teenager, she knew she had to live by a different set of rules than white teens. “As a child, I recognized that it was unfair, but didn’t understand that there were laws propping (segregation) up,” she said. Here, she gets her hair done for the prom.

Today, much has changed in Birmingham and this year, the city is marking the anniversary of its civil rights movement, which affected the entire nation. As part of its “50 Years Forward” celebrations, Birmingham sponsored the prom that was canceled in 1963 for five black high schools in the midst of the city’s civil rights struggle.

Eugene Arms, another member of the Class of 1963, gets his suit ready for Friday night’s prom. Arms said he attended civil rights rallies in Birmingham as a teenager, but not the pivotal Children’s March, when hundreds of children, some as young as 6, left school to march in opposition to segregation. Authorities responded with fire hoses and dogs. “All we did was give up prom,” he said.

Ethel Arms gets dressed for the prom. Eugene and Ethel were high school sweethearts.

Boutwell Auditorium is all decked out and ready for the prom to begin.

Classmates pause for a moment of prayer before the prom.

An ice sculpture greets the participants as they enter.

With her hair done and a new dress, Earnestine Thomas arrives in style. She said she can still picture the dress that she never got to wear in 1963, a long blue and green neon attention-grabber that showed different colors in the light as she moved. “Even though it was a winter dress, I was going to wear it to the prom,” Thomas said. “But in one fell swoop, that was wiped away.”

A photographer captures the special moment.

Eugene and Ethel Arms pose for their prom photo.

Bishop Calvin Woods addresses the attendees.

The prom was a celebration of what the Class of 1963 had endured and survived over the last 50 years. “As we get older, everything behind us looks greater,” Earnestine Thomas said.

Attendees enjoy a feast.

The music included songs by Aretha Franklin, Etta James, The Temptations, just what you would expect at a 1960s prom. But the song that drew the most bodies to the dance floor was “The Wobble,”
a hip-hop number with an accompanying line dance.

Shirley Holmes Sims poses with her prom date.

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More: Segregated prom yields to unity

She treated herself to a hair styling before donning a lavender dress with a sequined jacket and matching shoes. Lavender was a fitting color, she said, not just because it is her favorite, but because it was the school color at Parker High School.

It was a day of celebration that she and her classmates were denied in 1963.

Segregation in Birmingham permeated everything, down to the Bibles that judges used to swear witnesses in — there was one holy book for white witnesses and another for black witnesses.

Yet members of the class of 1963 recall having the same struggles as any other teenagers, then and today — parents’ rules, scrounging enough money for dates, finding reliable transportation.

As often is the case when people witness a historic period, many black high school students in Birmingham in 1963 did not recognize the moment that was upon them.

Years of advocacy by civil rights leaders had successfully chipped away at segregation, and students pushed the boundaries — as much out of teenage rebellion as a sense of justice.

Opinion: For Dr. King, everybody in and nobody out

CNN Photo Blog: Birmingham’s civil rights crusade

Thousands of arrests were made at the so-called Children’s March, and when the marches persisted for several days, authorities responded with fire hoses and dogs.

“This was a very controversial thing,” said Glenn T. Eskew, a history professor at Georgia State University who has written a book about Birmingham during this period. “There were those who did not believe that schoolchildren should be engaging in civil rights protests. Not only was it dangerous, but they were youth and it was a very confrontational thing.”

The images of children being hosed and intimidated by police dogs renewed a level of outrage at the national level that had been flagging.

“It changed the dynamic of the protest dramatically,” Eskew said. “It encouraged other youth to participate on one hand, and on the other it ratcheted up the pressure on the forces of white supremacy.”

50 years since MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham jail

Only a fraction of students from the black high schools participated. Many were told by their parents not to participate, for fear of losing a job or other retribution.

Thomas didn’t march because her grandfather expressed concerns that he might be fired if someone saw her protesting.

But everyone would be affected by the protests, whether they marched or not.

Days after the marches, the school board announced that all end-of-the-year activities were canceled for the class of 1963. No prom, no graduation, no yearbook.

The stated reason for the cancellations was security concerns; that in such a tense racial atmosphere, a gathering such as a graduation ceremony or prom could become the target of an attack.

Yet many believe that the events were taken away as a punishment for their participation in the marches.

If the authorities were truly concerned about the safety of the black students, they would not have met them with fire hoses and snarling dogs, said Bishop Calvin Woods, director of the Birmingham chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It was Woods, who was a father with children at the schools, who sued to have graduation reinstated.

A court eventually ordered graduation must go on, and it did, though delayed. But prom never happened.

Shirley Holmes Sims had her copper-colored dress ready to go when she left school to participate in the Children’s March. And copper-colored shoes to match.

They would go unworn, and be lost decades later in a tornado.

“We marched down that street and we were singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Sims said. “You think back to it today, and it was truly worth it.”

Righting a wrong

Ethel Arms has a line she uses when the topic of high school rites of passage and prom comes up: “We didn’t have a prom because of the civil rights movement.”

It puts the memory of 1963 in perspective and justifies the sacrifice.

Yet it doesn’t change the fact that inside, she has always lamented that she never had that night.

Sure, there were more important things going on in Birmingham at the time, but she was just a teenager and wanted those experiences.

This time, Arms was on the “prom committee” that organized Friday’s event. The small group gathered in a hotel room before the dance, laughing and reminiscing about the prom they never had. There would be no prom king and queen elected this time, but the theme of the dance summed up what the night was all about: “Finally, the Prom We Never Had.”

Sims ironed her purple and gold dress as the women placed corsages on their wrists and waited for the limousines that would take them to the prom.

Amid the celebratory atmosphere, there were moments of reflection, and thoughts of those classmates who had passed away.

In a way, this party was a celebration of what they had endured and survived over the last 50 years, Thomas said.

“As we get older, everything behind us looks greater,” she said.

The prom committee held hands and said a prayer before walking out of the room. This would be their night.

The prom was especially meaningful for Ethel Arms, as she and her high school sweetheart, Eugene, had been negotiating with their parents for permission to attend the prom when it was canceled in 1963. They had been trying to figure out where to find transportation to the dance, and how to earn the money to rent formal wear or buy a dress.

They later married, and when it came time for their children to attend proms, the couple put extra effort into making them special nights.

It wasn’t until Friday night, though, in Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium, that Eugene Arms was finally able to take his own sweetheart to the prom.

“It’s really a much more pleasant event because we can afford the attire, we have no problem getting back and forth,” Eugene Arms said.

“It makes you appreciate everything when we were children,” he continued. “The sacrifices people made.”

Eugene Arms had attended rallies during the civil rights movement, but out of deference to his parents, he did not participate in the Children’s March.

The students that did participate in the march faced dogs and water and arrests, he said.

“All we did was give up prom,” he said.

Opinion: Historic milestone for African-American voters in 2012