Was this really a good idea?

I was born and lived 10 yrs in Indiana and lived another 10 years of my life in Ohio. I grew up in tornado alley and knew all the steps to take if I was in a car, building, school, church or even out in the open to avoid being hurt/killed when I encountered a tornado (and if you live in tornado alley it will be a when). Two days ago a massive storm tore through parts of Alabama, Georgia and Missouri. Twenty people were killed, eight of them students at an Alabama high school. The town of Enterprise was warned three hours ahead of time that the storm would be moving through. Warning sirens blared at 10:30 a.m., the tornado hit at 1:15 p.m. School officials moved the students into the hallways at that time the sirens went off (what you are suppose to do). The officials dismissed school at 1:00 p.m. but most decided to stay. Survivors at the scene told of huddling in the auditorium. Now the way to survive a tornado if a basement is not at hand is to get into an interior room, hallway or bathroom and huddle under a blanket or mattress (yeah like most of us are capable of hauling our mattresses off our beds and into a bathroom). That being said why in the bloody hell did the teachers move the students from the hallways into the auditorium? Why did they even have school in session when the administrators were warned that morning that a massive storm was going through the area. I think it would have been far better (to a certain degree) that the students be left in the care of their parents at home. Yes you still would have had fatalities but you would not have had frantic parents rushing to the school, trying to find their kids. You wouldn't have had distraught parents digging through piles of rubble looking for their kids, and even worse then that, finding them dead. I can't even being to imagine shifting through tons of rubble, wondering if I was going to find the arm or leg of my dead child. I just shudder at the thought. I saw satellite images of that storm, so the people living in that area had to have seen it also. There is no way I would have sent my kids out in that kind of a storm, knowing that a tornado is always a possibility. There is not one state in the United States that doesn't have the capability of producing a tornado. It's just some states are at a higher risk. My prayers go out to the parents of the dead students and the survivors of those storms.