VIDALIA — Three years after Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, students in Leslie Hurst’s ninth-grade physical science class at Vidalia High School were full of questions about hurricanes.

But these questions weren’t about Katrina. The questions they asked were about Gustav, the hurricane that some weather models project will make landfall on the Louisiana coast before sending its remnants north to the Miss-Lou.

As soon as Hurst gave one answer, another question was posed. Can a hurricane come up the Mississippi River? Does the storm have to be in the Gulf of Mexico to be a hurricane? If the Miss-Lou is going to feel the effects of the hurricane, why would someone want to evacuate here?

The students have been asking more and more questions about the storm for the last several days, and Hurst decided to integrate the coming storm into their lessons.

“The chapter we are studying right now has to do with velocity and how movements occur,” she said. “We’re looking at how those things occur in a hurricane.”

Tuesday, the day the storm is projected to make landfall, the class will build and use wind, rain and barometric gauges, and will study how hurricanes form. The classroom will be converted into a meteorology center, where they will map the course of the storm.

Whether or not those lessons will happen is still up in the air.

Because the storm could turn and not make landfall in Louisiana once it is in the Gulf of Mexico, the Concordia Parish School Board is waiting until Monday to make the final decision about closing schools Tuesday, Superintendent Loretta Blankenstein said.

Though Hurst’s students have a fascination with the storm, the students were unsure how they feel about the coming inclement weather.

“I don’t like bad weather, and I don’t like losing electricity,” ninth grader Aly Shell said.

Her ninth-grade classmate Chase Stewart said he was concerned about falling trees.

“I want to know if we are going to get a lot of rain,” he said.

But even though she doesn’t like stormy weather, freshman Leslie Farmer did have one thing she is looking forward to.

“I like looking at the sky right before the storm, when it turns red,” she said. “It’s pretty.”

If evacuees are forced to stay in the area, both Vidalia High and Ferriday High School will be opened as shelters.

And in case that happens, part of Friday’s lesson was for students to make suggestions about what they could do to help others.

“That’s something that has come up several times,” Hurst said. “The students really want to be able to help.”