By KAITLYN KLEIN
KU Statehouse Wire Service
TOPEKA — After a tornado touched down 2 miles west of Goessel on prom night 2012, and another tornado took the life of a woman, the community realized it might not have adequate protection from severe weather.
If a tornado were to hit during the day, the 125 children attending Goessel Elementary School would have to kneel in the hallways with little protection.
That image didn’t sit well with superintendent John Fast. For six years he pursued every Federal Emergency Management Agency opportunity he could find to help fund a safe room. After coming back empty-handed countless times, the school board finally approved a $3.3 million bond project last spring in part to build a storm shelter for Goessel Elementary School.
“Our community discussed this and decided we could not stand around waiting for the government to come help build us one,” he said in an email, noting that FEMA guidelines were prohibitive.
The community felt strongly enough to pass the project with a 92 percent approval rating, Fast said. He also said that without state aid on building projects, they would not have been able to afford it.
Goessel is one of many Kansas communities taking action to protect students from severe weather by adding storm shelters to school buildings. Since 2001, 168 Kansas schools, or about 11 percent, have built safe rooms through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which provides FEMA funding.
However, one bill being discussed in the state Legislature this session suggests that not all Kansas’ schools are taking the measures needed to provide a storm shelter or safe room for their schoolchildren.
HB2326 was tabled after two days of committee discussion, but it would have required storm shelters to be built for any new or heavily renovated school buildings that house students.
The bill is not dead, however, because it was also introduced in the Senate (SB264), and the Federal and State Affairs committee recommended the bill to be passed. It has yet to reach the Senate floor for an official vote.
The goal of the bill is to “provide life-saving protection to all Kansas children in the event of extreme wind.”
To do that school districts would have to consult the Kansas Adjutant General’s Office on the specifications that would properly provide storm shelter protection.
Angee Morgan, deputy director for the Kansas Division of Emergency Management, supported the bill.
Morgan said in testimony submitted to the House Committee on Education Budget that many schools in Kansas were built with inherent structural weaknesses.
She said that adequate storm shelters are necessary to prevent causalities that could result from flying debris in severe weather.
“When built to nationally recognized standards, reinforced storm shelters are designed to provide near absolute protection,” Morgan said in her written testimony.
Kansas’ schools are not currently required by law to build storm shelters, but schools have been protecting their students by working with the Kansas Division of Emergency Management to provide shelters or safe rooms.
FEMA defines a safe room as a structure that is designed to meet its guidelines and provide “near-absolute protection” from severe weather including tornados and hurricanes.
Schools that use their own funding to build shelters are not included in the data kept by the Kansas Adjutant General’s Office, according to Sharon Watson, public affairs director.
With projects like the one in Goessel being considered in other communities, a bill requiring storm shelters might not change much for Kansas schools today, but it will impact all future building projects taken on by schools in Kansas.
Kaitlyn Klein is a University of Kansas junior from Bellevue, Neb., studying journalism and public policy.