Photo: Marni Cohen
The end-of-the-year party had just finished around 2:45 p.m. on Wednesday at Celia Hays Elementary School in Rockwall, Texas, and fourth-grade teacher Megan Parson was lining kids up for the school bus.
That’s when the principal announced on the loudspeaker that everyone needed to take shelter. Parson says the sky was dark and she knew there was a tornado watch in the area, so students lined the hallways — where there are no windows — as part of the school’s tornado safety plan.
“The students lean over in a turtle position with their hands over their head and their neck,” Parson tells PEOPLE. A police officer walking the hallway told the teachers they needed to bring all the parents waiting outside for their children indoors.
It was raining hard. Parson, a 25-year-oldfashion blogger on Instagram, was wearing a brand new Kimono and new suede shoes she bought the day before at Target. “Any girl that has suede shoes knows if you get suede wet they’re ruined,” she says.
Megan Parson
With that, she kicked off her shoes and ran outside barefoot, her red kimono blowing in the wind behind her.
“There were parents lined up all down the street trying to pick up kids,” Parson tells PEOPLE. “I’m waving my hands and they’re not moving. I started running up car to car. As soon as I’d get up to the window, they’d slowly roll down the window.”
“I kept wondering to myself, ‘Why am I having to run car to car? They should see people are jumping out of their cars,’ ” she adds. “Some people were on their phones or they just weren’t paying attention. I started running down the street trying to get every single parent out of their cars.”
Parents looked at Parson funny as she approached, and she quickly realized she was still wearing a fake mustache from the party. She ripped it off and kept running car-to-car.
“They probably thought I was crazy,” she says. “I kept running until I got to the very last car and told them to come inside. We had grandparents, moms, dads, babies we even had dogs inside the school.”
She emphasizes that she was not the only teacher outside, and she was just doing her job.
“I was so focused on just getting those parents to safety,” she tells PEOPLE. “My mind was: every single one of those parents were family members. They needed to get inside.”
One parent snapped a photo of Parson running through the street barefoot, kimono flying, with the threat of a twister just behind her.
“When I saw that picture, I was truly astonished,” Parson recalls.
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She also saw a video a neighbor took of the tornado, in which she is shown running straight through the shot.
“I was joking with my assistant principal that it’s going to become a GIF for Nordstrom’s Fall Sale starting,” she says.
Since then, people have called Parson a hero, telling her that her red kimono resembled a super hero’s cape blowing in the wind.
“My husband is actually a firefighter. When he went into work the next day, all of his buddies were joking, ‘At least there’s one hero in your family — it’s your wife.’ I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, babe,’ ” she says.
“I’m not gonna lie,” Parson adds. “I’m looking at a shirt that says, ‘Badass Mama’ right now. Should I buy it?”
The incident came amid two weeks of severe weather with at leasteight tornadoes touching down per dayacross the country, according to AccuWeather.
At least seven people have reportedly died as a result of the storms —one in Ohio,two in Oklahoma,three in Missouriandone in Iowa— and a tornado in Ohio’s Montgomery County left over80,000 people without power.
source: people.com
