County provides science teachers with severe weather materials

Materials to supplement sixth-grade science teacher's natural hazards lesson plans were recently passed on to Todd Freeman with Auburn City Schools, right, by Johnny Langley, an emergency planner with the Lee County Emergency Management Agency in Opelika. Alabama's Severe Weather Awareness Week is Feb. 17 - 24.

By: William White | Opelika Auburn News
Published: February 14, 2008

March 2007 roared in like a lion with 31 deadly tornadoes and 19 fatalities in Alabama and Georgia.

Included in those 19 deaths were eight students at Enterprise High School.

“We can all remember about a year ago, the very devastating events that took place in Enterprise, and how important it is to react to severe weather,” said Todd Freeman, executive director of operations and administrative services with Auburn City Schools.

“There are some things we can’t help. We can’t help a tornado running right into a building, but there are so many precautions we can take to protect ourselves in a event of something cataclysmic like that happens,” Freeman added.

“The relationship the EMA has with the schools is important for a number of reasons,” he said.

“We are required to do, at least twice during the school year, severe weather drills, which we do,” Freeman said. “In order to do that, we ask the EMA to survey our schools, looks for points or areas which are the safest areas for us to be, areas to avoid and procedures that we need to follow.

He said the EMA provides the schools a lot of additional services that are important to the school system.

“I can phone over here any time during severe weather,” he said. “They communicate with us via our radios at school as to when to expect severe weather and what to be looking out for.

“They give us expertise that we don’t necessarily have in schools about how to prepare our kids in school for emergency situations,” he said. “We find that to be invaluable.”

Freeman met with Johnny Langley, an emergency planner with the Lee County Emergency Management Agency, recently to pick up information for sixth-grade science teachers to use in the classroom about the upcoming annual Severe Weather Awareness Week, Feb. 17-24.

The information for sixth-grade earth science class teachers included posters, prepared lesson plans, guides for creating a disaster plan and CDs from the Emergency Management Agency in Alabama titled, “What You Should Know About Surviving the Storm” and “The Jet Stream.”