Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Local Schools May Get New Lights

BY AUTUMN LEAMONS

A new lighting system may be in the plans for the Prescott School District in the near future.

Scotty and Jerry Caroom from Excel Lighting and Maintenance Inc. was on hand to inform the board of the advantages of using the new lighting system.

Jerry Caroom told the board that he and his brother had over a hundred references from other schools that have replaced their old lighting with the new and improved system.

The reason for checking onto the lighting system is because the only lighting in the schools that has been recently redone are the lights in the high school when it was destroyed in 1996.

Most of the classrooms still have the old lighting. This is causing unreasonably high electric bills for the school district, the board has been told. It has also been found that the old lights cause eye damage to students, because of the strain from the poor lighting.

The two Caroom brothers explained to the board, "that the system would not cost the school a dime." The board was interested in finding out how that could be possible.

They said "that the school is paying outrageous electrical bills and after the new lights are put in it will cut down the electric bills by 60%," thus the savings would pay for the new lights.

At this time the school is paying out $94,000 a year for electricity. After the new lights are placed in the buildings the electrical bills will drop $14,000. Excel would allow the school 10 years to pay off the bill by paying the money saved as the amount owed every six months.

The board said that they were interested and would be getting back in touch with the two.

Hyacinth Deon, director of instruction in the Prescott District, was congratulated for two projects that she had been working on.

The first was teleconference that she had inquiring on the updating of the LMC automation project. Deon asked the people to come off their price 20% and they did. This saved the school $9,000.

Deon is also responsible for a technology grant that was awarded to the school for $42,000. There are only three schools in Arkansas that received this grant.

During the December 17 meeting, the board looked over the text books that were recommended for grades K through sixth grades. The books were all adopted and the students will be using them next fall.