The Centralia High School Board of Education heard updates on the ongoing solar project and approved a thirty-year power plan agreement with Keystone Power Holdings at the regular board meeting on Thursday. The plan locks in a rate of 4.75 cents per kilowatt hour for the full duration of the agreement. Since the last board meeting, an interconnection agreement with Ameren has been signed and countersigned, ensuring the project can move forward. With these agreements in place, construction is on track to take place by the end of 2024.
A possible delay in this project, according to Ross Calliott of Affordable Gas and Electric, could be the availability of transformers. As a component in short supply, it could take up to a year for step-up and step-down transformers to become available. Calliott suggested this problem could be solved on the engineering side by using a more readily available type of transformer, assuming Ameren approves the change from previous plans.
“The engineers (at Keystone) believe rather than using a step-up and a step-down transformer, they can just have the voltage coming off the array be higher, and then use a small step-down transformer, where wait times are like ten weeks, nothing like fifty weeks. If all that works and Ameren okays that… Keystone believes that October or November could be the construction timeframe.”
The board also approved a bond issue of $1,450,000 to fund a new turf football field. The approval tonight is the last preliminary step in the process, securing the funding that will pay for the new field to be installed this summer. Superintendent Chuck Lane says this field will be a great asset for the school and an improvement for student athletes without placing any new burdens on the taxpayer.
“We’re going to be using monies from the one percent sales tax to pay for it. There’s no increase in property taxes for this, there’s no using any of our regular monies for this, it’s all one percent sales tax. That new field will help not only football, but the band, the soccer program, and our baseball and softball teams in the spring… and it eliminates a lot of maintenance and other costs that we would normally have.”
Galen Mahle was appointed as CHS’s member of the Kaskaskia Special Education District governing board.
A painting bid contract with RP Coatings for $112,000 was approved. This contract is for painting classrooms on the upper floor this summer.
In retirements and resignations, the board accepted a letter of retirement from Lisa Graham as guidance office secretary effective July 31, a letter of resignation from Melissa Doetsch as English teacher effective at the end of the current school year, and a letter of resignation from Dayton Bauer as annex aide effective April 26.
In employment, the board approved motions to employ Benjamin Alli as social science teacher for the 2024-2025 school year, Ashlee Snyder as guidance office secretary effective May 1, and Kelci Baum as full-time annex aide, each contingent upon successful completion of employment history required by Faith’s Law. Annie Berry was employed as science teacher for the 2024-2025 school year.
