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Mary Fallin on Education

Republican

 


Build schools with tornado safe rooms

Q: In the recent tornadoes, a lot of schools did not have a safe place where the children could go. Are you going to try to rethink how you build schools when you start to put these schools back?

FALLIN: Absolutely. And let me just say that we do have 100 schools in Oklahoma that do have safe rooms; and schools that have been [damaged] in the past, many of them have rebuilt rooms as some sort as a safe room in their school and we're certainly going to encourage that. But I do think it's important to have a very vigorous discussion as to what can we do within budgetary means to be able to provide a safe place. Certainly every school has drills. They have a plan. And the teachers did follow those different plans. Any death is very unfortunate, but it's truly incredible that we had only 24 deaths at this site because if you look at all the debris field and how wide it is, I don't know how anybody survived this tornado. But people took the precautions they were supposed to take.

Source: Face the Nation 2013 on 2014 Oklahoma gubernatorial race , May 26, 2013

Give option of escaping failing schools