WORKERS HAVE repaired much of the damage caused by the tornado that ripped through Southern Maryland on April 28, killing six and wrecking much of the town of La Plata.

But how about youngsters like Raven Smoot, who says she's "filled with grief" at the age of 8? Or Janice Spearbeck, 10, whose house was destroyed while she and her parents huddled behind a stove? How to repair them? One way, figured Lisa Wisniewski, a Charles County school resource teacher, was to ask them to write about the storm.

In the weeks after the tornado, she and teachers at three Charles elementary schools solicited drawings, poems, essays and journal entries from some of the disaster's youngest witnesses. The work was collected by Gail Lynn Goldberg, a writing consultant, and passed on to Education Beat.

Janice, a fifth-grader at Dr. James Craik Elementary in Pomfret, barely escaped with her life. It was she who prompted Wisniewski to ask for other children's impressions.

"Janice hugged me and assured me that she knew how she was going to deal with it all," Wisniewski recalled. "'Mrs. Wiz,' she told me, "'I'm going to write about it. My mom is getting me a journal tonight.'"

Janice and her parents heard the storm coming and saw the living room wall separate four feet from the foundation.

"[I thought] the whole house was going to collapse on us and we were going to die. I held on tight to my mother and prayed to the lord that we were not going to die. My whole life then passed before my very eyes. My family, pictures, fights, unhappy times, happy times to all the contents of the day itself," she wrote.

"Then it ended. It lasted about 45 seconds. I thought we were dead, but we weren't. The lord above had saved us. Those 45 seconds changed my life forever. My house was destroyed. Everything was gone except pictures. I stood staring at my house tears silently flowed down my face. Why did this happen to me?"

Jamal Andre Spriggs, 9, a fourth-grader at Middleton Elementary School in Waldorf, described the storm poetically:

A tornado is a spiral that spins dark

that kills in one strike,

As children cry and scream

All through the night.

And Heaven's gate will open

As people go in.

But today the sun beams up,

as I look at the damage it did,

watching.

Raven Smoot, a second-grader at Gale-Bailey Elementary in Marbury, printed his essay neatly on lined paper.

"My aunt Barbra was in La Plata while I was home playing. She was crying. She was upset. I'm very filled with grief for the people [who] lost their loved ones. I'm glad that my family is safe. I don't know what I'll do without my family. They are very special to me."

The youngest essayists, Ginafer Lewis and Mathew Simmons, both 6 and in first grade at Craik Elementary, displayed a reporter's eye for detail.

Ginafer wrote: "Once upon a time a tornado hit La Plata and destroyed people's homes and destroyed KFC. My friend Ashley was in KFC. Ashley said, 'What's that?' It was a black cloud and they ran into KFC and went in the bathroom and the roof came off."

Mathew wrote: "I walked through La Plata. My Granddad's work is gone. The church is destroyed. CVS's roof is gone. Dash-In is gone with soda still in it. I saw one house all gone."

Goldberg and Wisniewski disagreed with colleagues who said tapping memories of such a tragedy would be too painful.

"These drawings, poems, essays and journal entries serve as a reminder that we don't just teach students to write to perform well on tests," said Goldberg.

Added Wisniewski: "These are words from the children's hearts. Simple, detailed, packed with emotions -- healing."

MSPAP doesn't fare well when grading state tests

Maryland's now-discarded MSPAP was judged 37th among state testing programs in a study by Princeton Review, the test preparation company.

It was the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program's unconventional approach -- assessing schools rather than individuals and relying entirely on performance of tasks -- that earned it the bad marks, said Steven Hodas, author of the study.

"In many ways," he said, "Maryland's program was the most sophisticated and teacher-supportive of all the states."

North Carolina, Texas and New York earned the highest marks. West Virginia, Hawaii and Iowa brought up the rear.