A worker passes through a two-classroom space at Langston Hughes Elementary, June 26, 2014. The space was reinforced to serve as a storm shelter in the event of severe weather.

New building and construction codes regarding storm shelter safety requirements will have no effect on the Lawrence school district’s upcoming bond issue.

The code amendments, approved Tuesday by the Lawrence City Commission, require storm shelters for any new K-12 educational facilities as well as any existing schools where an addition would increase current square footage by more than 25 percent. This rules out any ongoing projects, including the final renovations being carried out now as part of the district’s 2013 bond issue for elementary schools, as well as the proposed $87 million bond issue slated for a May election that would renovate Lawrence’s secondary schools.

“We’re going to meet the code as it stands, but the code is not requiring us to build any ICC-500 shelters,” said Tony Barron, the district’s director of facilities and operations.

District leaders voiced concern over the new requirements first proposed in early 2016, which incorporated the 2015 editions of the International Code Council (ICC) model construction codes, among other standards. At issue then was the requirement that storm shelters be designed and constructed to withstand winds of up to 250 mph, a mandate in line with standards developed by the ICC in consultation with the National Storm Shelter Association and FEMA.

Although renovations at all 20 Lawrence schools as part of the 2013 bond issue included “hardened space” shelters with steel reinforcements and concrete ceilings, those spaces do not meet international or national FEMA-approved codes for storm shelters, district spokeswoman Julie Boyle told the Journal-World last February.

Last spring, district officials reached out to the city’s planning department to discuss their concerns. At the time, then-Superintendent Rick Doll noted the “high cost” of designing and building such shelters. That ultimately led to an ad-hoc review committee comprising representatives from local public and private schools, architects and structural engineers, and city officials.

After a series of meetings from June to late October, the now-newly approved code amendments were brought to the review committee, which reached a general consensus that the language used was acceptable.

Originally, Barron said, “the concern was the small additions that we would have budgeted for.” The code initially “read that anything with an occupant load of 50 or more, you would be required to build a storm shelter for the entire school,” he continued. “So, that means if we have a capacity of 2,000 students, and we’re only going to put a 50-student addition in, the code as it read would have required us to build a storm shelter for the current population.”

Most classrooms have an occupancy load of 30 to 35 students, meaning the addition of more than one classroom to a school would trigger the requirement for a storm shelter that could fit the occupancy of the entire school. Both Lawrence High School and Free State High School are expected to receive additional classrooms, to accommodate the district’s growing population, as part of the proposed 2017 bond issue.

According to city documents, the “hardened space” shelters already in Lawrence schools can withstand wind speeds of 160 to 180 mph, which would theoretically protect buildings against most, but not all, tornado categorizations on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Current shelter spaces would be able to withstand the four — or possibly five, depending on wind speed — least destructive tornado types out of the six designated on the EF Scale.

The most dangerous of these, EF4 and EF5 tornadoes, are rare but not undocumented in Kansas. Nearly 10 years ago, an EF5 tornado struck the tiny southwestern Kansas community of Greensburg, leveling nearly the entire town and killing 11 people and injuring 63 others in the process.

For now, the school district feels confident in the shelter spaces already provided, Barron said. He feels just as confident, however, that talks about school safety will remain an ongoing conversation moving forward.

“We have dedicated areas that we go to right now that are interior spaces that we feel are adequate,” Barron said. “In the future at some point, if our school board or the community decides that that’s something they want to engage in, we’d be more than happy to sit down and discuss it.”

The new storm shelter requirements will apply to facilities typically built by the city or county as well. The requirements wouldn’t cover renovations, but would apply to newly constructed facilities deemed critical to operate during an emergency, such as 911 call centers, police stations and fire stations. City officials said the idea is to ensure the viability of such facilities in event of a tornado or other disaster.

“That’s the idea, that you have those first responders available when you really need them, after a tornado or something like that,” said Kurt Schroeder, assistant director of development services. “So hopefully the responders in that facility or the communications in that facility are still available.”