22 students killed in Switzerland crash

HEVERLEE, Belgium -- A torchlight march. Ravioli and meatball dinners. Rides in a funicular railway. A sing-a-long and a dress-up casino evening.

Those were some of the things that made last week "mega-cool" for 24 sixth-graders of the St. Lambertus school in a hotel in Saint-Luc, high in the Swiss Alps.

The good times turned tragic Tuesday when their bus, which also carried kids from a second Belgian school, crashed inside a Swiss tunnel on its way home. Twenty-two youngsters from the two different schools died, along with six adults.

The dead included "teacher Frank," who had set up the native-language Dutch blog that had kept parents and schoolchildren who stayed home informed about all the fun.

Parents were flown to Switzerland on Wednesday to find out whether their children were still alive. Sixteen St. Lambertus students were confirmed to have survived, but the fate of eight others was unknown.

Nine days earlier they had left for the holiday of their school lives in the snow-covered Alps of Switzerland, an annual highlight for St. Lambertus kids. The school is a typical, small Roman Catholic institution of some 200 pupils in Heverlee, on the outskirts of the old university town of Leuven, and represents the broad mix of social classes of the municipality.

The week began flawlessly.

"This is our first blog posting," wrote Frank Van Kerckhove, the teacher who set up the blog. "The bus trip was very smooth. There was little traffic. We watched the movie Avatar [and] no one became car sick on the climb" into the Alps.

In the days that followed, the youngsters posted about their vacation with youthful exuberance. "This afternoon we had soup and ravioli, very delicious," one girl wrote on March 6.

Relatives of the students were grateful that Van Kerckhove, one of six adults who died in the crash, had set up the site. "The blog was incredible. It had so many great pictures," said Anne De Roo, whose three children are former students at the school. The fate of her nephew was now uncertain.

"He constantly gave us news about what happened, the sked of the day," she said of Van Kerckhove. His last words came down to 'we see you back soon,' " she said.