At 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, students at Ithica Elementary in Villa Rica were surprisingly quiet, even though they were outside of class.

They were seated along the walls in the hallways, their knees pulled to their chests and their hands covering their bowed heads while their teachers watched over them.

The short break from class gave the students an opportunity to practice the emergency measures they should take in case of a tornado, as part of a statewide tornado drill sponsored by the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.

The children at Ithica practiced their drill in two parts. Because of the four mobile classrooms at the school, the principal first announced a code gray, to evacuate students from the mobile classrooms to the main school building.

“We watch the Weather Channel,” Principal Michael Roberts said. “The county provides BlackBerrys for us so we can watch the Doppler radar on our BlackBerry and that gives us a good idea of what to do.”

When severe weather approaches, the mobile classrooms are evacuated first even if the rest of the school is not under an emergency warning to protect the children from the less stable buildings.

“(We) bring them in the building and teach them in a classroom that’s not being used at that moment or just send them back to homeroom until the weather passes,” Roberts said. “If we decide that we need to do an actual drill situation, we will call a code red and bring the kids out into the hall.”

Children throughout the county practiced the drills during this Severe Weather Awareness Week.

After the major storms that moved through Carroll County in 2008, causing major damage and school closings in Bowdon, the drills took on added meaning to Director of Public Safety and Security for Carroll County Schools Brian Doss.

“When you have something like that it does reinforce the need to drill and to drill correctly,” Doss said, as he walked through the school’s halls checking to make sure the children and teachers were where they were supposed to be and all the doors were closed.

Carroll County Emergency Management Agency volunteers and employees were on hand to make sure everything went smoothly. The drills are an important part of being prepared for severe weather, said Tim Padgett, director of the agency. The drills have been a part of the states storm preparation practice since the late 1980s, he said.

“Georgia has embraced it and we utilize it to work with the school system the universities,” Padgett said. “We also utilize it to work with private industry as well as health care, the hospitals. They all participate in the drill.”

The university sirens sounded earlier in the morning for their drill on Wednesday.

While students were not evacuated from class as part of the drill. The university did test its e-mail notification, and the UWG Emergency Alert voice/text messaging system for the drill.