• Chaos and courage as tornado wrecks elementary schools

    Sue Ogrocki / AP

    A child is pulled from the rubble of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., and passed along to rescuers on May 20.

    By Matthew DeLuca and Miranda Leitsinger, NBC News

    Rhonda Crosswhite, a sixth-grade math at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., said the idea that school might be canceled Monday because of a looming tornado had never even crossed her mind.

    “We never think that’s an option,” Crosswhite told NBC News. “We live in Oklahoma. Tornadoes happen all the time.”

    The massive tornado that tore through Moore and killed 24 people bore down hard on Plaza Towers, where children sheltered inside from the roaring gusts, even as the building began to come apart around them.

    The seven students who were killed at Plaza Towers, a single-story cinder block building that was leveled in the storm, were found dead in a pool of water, authorities said. Another student died at Briarwood Elementary, less than two miles away.

    Richard Rowe / Reuters

    Rescue workers look through the rubble at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., on May 21, after a devastating tornado ripped through the town on May 20.

    Tracy Stephan told NBC News that she went to Plaza Towers to pick up her daughter, who suffers from autism and epilepsy, before the tornado hit. She found the doors locked, with the tornado bearing down on her.

    “Eventually after five minutes after not getting through, I turned back home and I decided to put my faith and trust in God the school was going to be OK,” the mother of three told NBC News. She ran back to the school after the twister passed, and found her daughter outside in the parking lot with other kindergartners.

    “I grabbed her and wrapped her in my arms,” said Stephan.

    Levi Hendricks also sped toward the school as the tornado took aim, to pick up his eleven-year-old granddaughter Kimberly. The fourth-grader meanwhile was crouched with some of her classmates in a bathroom and then a hallway.

    After the tornado passed through, they found a way out of the demolished school.

    “She was already out,” when he arrived at the school, Hendricks said. “They had an organized area where all the kids gathered at.”

    Hendrick’s house, the back door of which once faced Plaza Towers’ busy playground, was flattened by the tornado.

    “The playground was always full of kids, always even after school the kids all went up there and hung out because the playground was such a nice place for them to play at,” Hendricks said. “It was a nice family school. People who went there, now their kids are going there.”

    Thirty-year-old working mother Janna Ketchie recounts the frantic journey into the heart of a tornado's destruction in order to find her three children, who were miles away at a daycare center. NBC News' Ann Curry reports.

    In the aftermath of the storm, the First Baptist Church of Moore, about three and half miles from Plaza Towers, became a gathering place for students from all of the city’s schools who had not found their guardians, church spokesman Joey Dean said.

    “We got word from the schools that they were going to bus all the kids who had not been picked up by their parents yet,” Dean said. Teachers and counselors shuttled over the students in their personal cars.

    “Most them went home, and those who didn’t have homes, they spent the night,” Dean said.

    Children in the city’s schools regularly prepare for the possibility of a tornado, district employees said.

    “We have tornado and fire drills periodically throughout the year,” said Noah Minton, a psychologist for the Moore Public School district.

    “They have drills, they have proposals they follow, but something this large, you get out of the way,” Minton said.

    U.S. Representative Tom Cole, a resident of Moore, said on MSNBC that Plaza Towers was one of the most structurally sound buildings in the area.

    “Yesterday our administrators, staff, teachers and students put our crisis plan into action immediately,” Moore Public Schools Superintendent Susan Pierce said at a press conference on Tuesday. “A tornado’s path is very unpredictable, but with little notice we implemented our tornado shelter procedures at every school site.”

    City disaster plans and school documents show that officials had thought through what to do in the event of a tornado. They also suggest, however, that officials did not anticipate a disaster of this scale.


    If a tornado came during the school day, teachers were instructed to have the students remain in their classrooms unless told to take them elsewhere, according to a cached version of the district’s 2012-2013 handbook for elementary school students and parents.

    “Sudden tornadoes are a common occurrence in Oklahoma, especially in the spring of the year. Each of our schools has a tornado procedure, and the faculty and students have storm drills periodically,” the handbook reads. “If severe weather is rapidly approaching at the time of dismissal, students will be held at the school until the danger is passed. If there is a tornado warning but no immediate danger, school will be dismissed on schedule.”

    The city of Moore does not have any community tornado shelters, according to the city’s department of emergency management website. The guidelines posted online also refer to the May 3, 1999 tornado outbreak that killed 36 others and injured 295 more.

    “If we are struck again, it will very likely be by a much less intense storm,” the website says. “Sheltering in your residence – assuming it is a reasonably well-constructed home – is the best option.”

    Hendricks said he thinks the instructions to shelter at Plaza Towers might have saved his granddaughter’s life.

    “I do know there was a lot of lost lives, but I think there would have been a lot more if they let them out,” Hendricks said.

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  • Atlanta educators begin surrendering in school cheating scandal

    David Goldman/AP

    Atlanta Public Schools defendant Sandra Ward, right, turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail accompanied by her attorney Robbin Shipp on April 2 in Atlanta.

    By David Beasley, Reuters

    Former educators indicted in a cheating scandal that has rocked Atlanta's public school system began turning themselves in to authorities on Tuesday, ahead of a deadline to surrender voluntarily.


    At least three of the 35 former Atlanta public school educators indicted by a grand jury last week had reported to the Fulton County jail by mid-morning, according to jail records.

    They face charges including racketeering and making false statements for allegedly conspiring to alter and improve standardized test scores to obtain cash bonuses, according to prosecutors.

    Atlanta educators accused in the cheating scandal have begun to turn themselves in to face allegations they changed students test scores to earn bonuses. NBC's Thanh Truong reports.

    Former Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall was among the former teachers, principals and administrators named in the 65-count indictment returned on Friday. She was not among the first defendants who turned themselves in.

    All of the defendants have been given a Tuesday deadline by the Fulton County district attorney's office to surrender or face arrest in their homes or workplaces.

    Hall was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2009, the same year prosecutors contend widespread cheating took place.

    She received a $78,000 bonus that year from the school system for improving its test scores, prosecutors said.

    "The money she received, we are alleging, was ill gotten and it was theft," Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said at a news conference on Friday.

    Related:

    School cheating investigation puts Atlanta teachers, principals at center of scandal

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  • 'Mariachi has changed my life': Mexican music grabs US students

    Courtesy of Ramon Rivera

    Members of the Wenatchee High School mariachi band get ready to perform at the Washington Apple Blossom Festival in Yakima, Wash., on April 28.

    By Sevil Omer, NBC News

    Mariachi is resounding in hundreds of U.S. public schools offering the festive Mexican folk music as part of their band classes, music experts say. Many student musicians will get a chance to show their passion for it at events surrounding Cinco de Mayo on Saturday.


    “Its popularity has exploded, and music programs all around the country are bursting with enthusiasm,” said Ramon Rivera, the mariachi program director for the Wenatchee School District in Wenatchee, Wash. His mariachi program boasts 300 students, he says, and draws more young players every year from the community of 30,000 residents in north-central Washington.

    Mariachi bands are no longer confined to states along the U.S. border or American cities with growing Hispanic populations, said Daniel Sheehy, a mariachi expert and director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C.

    At least 500 U.S. public schools now offer mariachi as part of their music curricula and there are local and state competitions, Sheeny said. He said members at the Music Educators National Conference have created a task force to see how many mariachi programs had taken root in the last five years.

    "Mariachi has all the ingredients to make it a powerful movement," Sheeny said. "It’s infectious and honest music and a touchstone of identity." Sheehy has studied the genre for nearly three decades and is the author of "Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture."

    Many school bands are gearing up for Cinco de Mayo celebrations. “There is a saying that we live and breathe mariachi in Texas, and that’s no joke,” said Robert Rodriguez, a mariachi director for the Victor Independent School District in Victoria, Texas. “Cinco de Mayo is one of the biggest days for us. We’ll be playing all day long, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.” He said he teaches mariachi to 50 students from the district’s two high schools.

    In the Las Vegas area, the Clark County School District's mariachi program has experienced a boom. "We started with four schools and about 250 students in the first year," said Javier Trujillo, who was recruited to help develop the program in southern Nevada in 2002. He said within a decade, the program blossomed to include 15 schools, 16 instructors and 2,500 students. He said he doesn't teach in the schools anymore, but plays in a mariachi band.

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    Marcia Neel, who retired this year as coordinator of secondary fine arts for Clark County schools, said Trujillo was being modest about the mariachi program's growth in Las Vegas.

    "I would say the numbers of students involved in mariachi is somewhere near 3,000 students," she said. "Mariachi is so popular that I have made it my own personal business, and I have been busy."

    She said school districts in Iowa, Tennessee and northern Nevada have invited her to help start mariachi programs at their middle and high schools.

    "It is folk music of a country that engages not only the child, but the parent and the entire family," she said. "What is not to love about it?"

    The growing number of Mexican-Americans has helped bump up the number of youths interested in the music from their homeland, music instructors say.

    But students say it's the beat and the joy of the music that drew them.

    "It's my passion, I love it," said Monica Moreno, 14, from Wenatchee High School.

    She said she grew up listening to mariachi in her home, where her parents often danced to the music.

    "I couldn't stand it," Moreno said. "I hated listening to it while I was growing up. Then everything changed when I watched a performance of mariachi performers at high school. They had passion. They had smiles. They were having fun and that's when I knew I wanted to play in a mariachi band."

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    Moreno plays the violin in Wenatchee High School's ninth-grade program.

    "I will never stop doing it," she said.

    The music of mariachi originated in the state of Jalisco, in Mexico, sometime during the 19th century. While no one knows for sure how mariachi started, the style is certain. Musicians wear elaborate traditional suits of the horseman, traje de charro. Love, betrayal, revolutionary heroes, even animals are common themes of mariachi songs. Common instruments are violins, trumpets, guitars, vihuelas (a five-stringed relative of the guitar), and the guitarrón (a large-bodied acoustic bass).

    Megan Howard, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Pioneer Middle School in Wenatchee, says she had always wanted to play guitar but wasn’t interested in classical instruction.

    Howard said she first learned how to play mariachi music in fifth grade and now wants to try out for a spot on the high school's mariachi team.

    “The music is beautiful, upbeat and fun to play,” said Howard. She said her heart beats along to mariachi.

    “Through the music and the musicians I learned about how Mexicans care [about] their land,” she said. “I’ve learned not only to play, but learned to appreciate things that are important in life. Mariachi has changed my life.”

    Does your school have a mariachi band? Let us know on the msnbc.com US News Facebook page. 

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  • With technology, 'Students can become teachers'

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    Think watching movies all day rots your brain? Don’t worry, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on it.

    In addition to keeping the 15 million subscribers of his mail-order movie business happy, Hastings, an educational philanthropist, wants to get the word out about DreamBox Learning – an e-learning site that he acquired in April.

    “It’s adaptive, so it learns what level the student is at, and helps students learn more,” Hastings told msnbc.com after participating in a panel on technological innovations at schools at NBC’s Education Nation summit, a weeklong look at education in America.

    DreamBox is a web-based program that Hastings is hoping teachers and parents alike will use with students. “You don’t have to install anything. It’s an extraordinary site,” he said.

    But as Hasting’s fellow panelists noted, using such learning tools in the classroom requires infrastructure that many schools lack.

    “We need the computers, we need the wires,” said panelist Nancy Peretsman, Priceline.com director and a managing director at Allen & Co. LLC, a New York investment company. “We have to be able to make sure the infrastructure is in place.”

    Said Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lewis Educational Foundation, “Everyone uses computers at work. Waitresses, mechanics – no one doesn’t use a computer. The only place we don’t see computers are in classrooms.”

    Bringing technology into the classroom will complement, not replace, teachers, Peretsman said. “This is about helping teachers become more effective,” she said. “We have to do it in collaboration with the teachers.”

    Noting that most of the current 57 million U.S. students are “digital natives” – kids who were born into a digital world – Hastings urged teachers to use their pupils’ innate technology skills to their advantage.

    “Students can become teachers,” added Chen. “They can teach their teachers; they can teach each other.”