SEVERAL SCHOOLS DESTROYED IN THE MAY 3RD TORNADO

On May 3, 1999, the most lethal tornado in the history of weather recording caused great destruction in several communities in Oklahoma. Roaring out of the southwest one major tornado caused significant damage in several communities...Chickasha, Bridge Creek, Moore, Midwest-Del City, Choctaw and Stroud. Other tornado activity caused significant damage in Mulhall and Dover. One of the hardest hit areas was Moore. In this community, one school, Kelly Elementary, was totally destroyed and Westmoore High School suffered significant damage. In Moore also, the Regional Education Service Center suffered total destruction. In the week following the storm, one of the employees from the Moore RESC described the situation in these words "The office is gone. The psychometrists and secretaries crawled through rubble trying to find anything we could salvage. We did manage to save some test kits and protocols, and the SDE came down and pulled out all of our confidential records. we're going back in today to try and get more stuff out. Keep your fingers crossed that we get a new office SOON." At the time of the publication of this newsletter, the Moore RESC is operating out of the SDE offices. They can be reached at 405 521-4155 and their mail can be sent to their former address: 1312 Northwest 12th, Suite 109, Moore, OK 73170-1015.

Another community with a school destroyed was Mulhall-Orlando in Logan county. This consolidated school placed the elementary building in Mulhall with the high school building located in the neighboring community of Orlando. A special education teacher from Mulhall had renewed her friendship with me by e-mail just weeks before the tornado. When I worked at the Kingfisher RESC Mulhall was one of my schools and she recalled our work together there. After the tornado, she wrote "The tornado demolished Mulhall-Orlando Elementary and the little town. It gave me a nightmare after I went to get materials out of my room. I did not stay long with the help there. The ceiling and building was unstable and unsafe. They were tearing down the brick wall of the gym just outside my window while we were still in the room. We will probably be in portable buildings on the high school grounds next year. Our new school hopefully will have a storm shelter for the community."

School personnel and students of the affected communities will be impacted by the results of this disaster. School psychologists and other school based mental health professionals may be called upon to deliver crisis intervention services. As a profession we must be ready to meet such challenges. The May 1999 issue of the Communiqué offers an article "Winds of Terror: Children's Responses to Hurricane and Tornado disasters" which discussed what school and mental health professionals need to know about how children respond to these types of disasters. There is an extensive bibliography. The article is reprinted from Crisis Prevention and Response (NASP, 1999) .

Submitted by: Helen Copp , OSPA Today Managing Editor

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