Wichita ? Using federal grant money matched with part of the district’s $285 million bond issue, school officials in Wichita have built tornado-proof safe rooms at 26 schools.

“We’ve done everything humanly possible to provide the best protection in schools,” said Martin Libhart, chief operations officer for the Wichita district.

An additional five safe rooms are under construction, and three more will be built by the end of next year. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Wichita also has built shelters at five schools in Wichita and Hutchinson using grant money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

With the safe rooms in place, school officials say parents should seek shelter when a tornado warning is issued and wait for it to pass before calling their children’s school. The safe rooms allow teachers to teach in spite of the warnings because they “provide near-absolute protection,” facilities director Roger Savage said.

Students won’t have to seek shelter in interior hallways and rooms, he said.

The school district focused construction at elementary, special education and early childhood schools because those are the smallest buildings with the least amount of shelter, Savage said. Middle and high schools, he said, are generally larger and offer good interior protection.

The federal grant money was part of disaster declarations in the Wichita area that followed the 1999 tornadoes, flooding along the Cowskin Creek in 1998 and an ice storm in 2002. Fifteen percent of the federal money that came with the declarations was set aside for preventive projects like the shelters.