Tornado siren inaudible at school

LAPEL, Ind. -- Officials at an elementary school said they did not evacuate children from classrooms during a tornado because they could not hear warning sirens over the storm.\nStudents at Lapel Elementary were kept in their classrooms as the storm passed rather than being taken to the halls away from the windows, the Herald Bulletin of Anderson reported Wednesday.\n"I was horrified," said Amy Jones, whose son is a second-grader at the school. "All the time, schools do tornado drills. This was the real thing. Why not put the students in the drill? That is not acceptable."\nThe tornado, the most destructive of three the National Weather Service determined occurred Friday, followed a path of 112 miles from Ellettsville in south-central Indiana. The Red Cross said the storms damaged more than 2,000 homes, mobile homes and apartment units and destroyed or did major damage to more than 200.\nNo one was killed.\nThe NWS issued a tornado warning for Madison County, but Frankton-Lapel Superintendent Ned Speicher said school officials could not hear the town's warning siren through the storm because it was too far away.\n"We did put the schools on alert status, but we didn't have the students get under their desks," Speicher said. "We were prepared to move them in a moment's notice."\nNot hearing the warning sirens was not a good enough reason to leave children in their classrooms, Jones said.\n"I live in an area where I couldn't hear the siren and I knew to go to a safe place," she said.\nSpeicher said not having the students leave the classrooms for safer areas of the building was a mistake.\nTown officials have agreed to install another warning siren on the school's property, Speicher said.