A Federal Emergency Management Agency grant may be used to build eight safe rooms at DeKalb West School.
A proposed lunchroom addition will most likely will not qualify for grant money, as the population around the school is not dense enough.
Alan Troy, an architect for Kaatz, Binkley, Jones & Morris Architects of Mount Juliet told the board of education Thursday night that "DeKalb West is eligible for the FEMA Hazard grant.”
“There were a couple of requirements for that which are being taken care of,” Troy elaborated. “It is eligible for the grant, but one of the requirements is that there needs to be a FEMA approved Hazard Mitigation Plan which you do not have.
“I understand that someone with the Tennessee Emergency Management Association and those representatives have set up a meeting with the county to get that plan and to get it approved,” said Troy.
FEMA offers millions of dollars in grants under the  Hazard Mitigation Grant Program for the building of safe rooms to be used in the event of an emergency.
The new rooms at DeKalb West would also help with overcrowded conditions at the facility.
The school system may apply for up to $3 million in grant money for this project, with the federal government paying 75 percent of the cost.
The state would pay 12.5 percent, leaving the school system to pay the remaining 12.5 percent of the cost.
Board members hoped to obtain grants for construction of a new kitchen/cafeteria area at the school, but sparse population in the area excludes the project from qualifying.
“The plan was initially to include the kitchen and cafeteria work but it’s based on the area that this will serve,” Troy told the board. “You won't be eligible to include that much area,” he said.
Director Mark Willoughby said that a survey had been done, and the nearby population is just not dense enough to meet the standards required to obtain the grant money for the cafeteria project.
“We surveyed a half-mile radius of the school and because of the fact that the population is not very dense within a half mile radius of that school, that's one of the reasons that it doesn't qualify for us to do the cafeteria in this grant,” Willoughby said.
“Because this is FEMA and it would be used in case of emergencies, the complete school could go in those eight classrooms that we're hoping to build for tornado drills, tornadoes, and things like that.
“Those eight rooms would take care of faculty, staff, students, and everybody in the school. They would have a safe place to be,” the director continued.
“We were hoping we could get the cafeteria and the kitchen in with this if the population had been high enough there.
“That way we could have also opened it to the community if we had an emergency situation. As far as being able to build the cafeteria at this time with FEMA money, that is probably not going to be in the package," said Willoughby.
Willoughby expressed hope that other schools will qualify for the program as well.
"If these grants continue, we will be looking toward doing this at other places,” he said.
The board  has scheduled a workshop for Feb. 18 at 9 a.m. to discuss the project further.
The deadline for submitting the grant application is March 1.