Greater Jasper Consolidated School board members made a big decision on the fate of the Tenth Street Elementary School Building.
The board approved to demolish the building to create a parking lot during their monthly meeting on Monday night.
This parking lot will be used in a variety of ways. Local stadiums, sports complexes, and city tennis courts will use it as overflow parking.
However, board members decided to not demolish the playground or the storage facility currently located at the site. This will be used to help maintain the property.
Stenftenagel Group Clerk of the Works Owner, Scott Stenftenagel, says that they are also talking with Tammy Lampert of the Southwestern Indiana Child Advocacy Center Coalition. The two organizations are talking about retaining the newer 1988 building addition, and demolishing the 1956 school facility and constructing a new wall and relocating utilities.
Stenftenagel also says that there are a lot of steps to take before the demolition. This includes compiling a list of loose equipment and furniture to auction or sell to interested vendors, pending school board approval.
They are also talking with city utilities to coordinate the removal of existing utilities to the building. Before demolition, these utilities would have to be disconnected, terminated, and removed.
Board members approved an agreement with the Catholic Diocese of Evansville that allows the school corporation to continue using the property.
If the school no longer needs Ruxer Field and the parking lot, the property would go back to the diocese.
A demolition timeline is not available at this time, but board members say they expect the bidding process to start in October.
Another hot topic discussed at last night’s monthly meeting was school buses.
Seven buses were recently equipped with school bus arm cameras.
Director of Transportation and Student Services, Glenn Buechlein, explains how these cameras work.
“When we have a violation, the bus driver simply pushes a button that is similar to a doorbell. This is called an event marker,” he says.
This will pinpoint when the violation took place in the recording. Buechlein says this makes the process more time-efficient when tracking down the violators.
“We will pull the DVR out of the camera, and go back and view it on our laptops. We can go straight to the event marker and take a snapshot or a mini video of the violator,” he says.
While looking at the video, school officials are able to get a clear picture of the driver’s face and license plate number.
After this, the information is given to the School Resource Officer, who will serve the citation.
Buechlein also took the time to recognize the bus drivers at last night’s meeting.
He says the bus drivers are doing an extraordinary job with implementing new sanitizing precautions.
These include maintaining a seating chart to help with contact-tracing and sanitizing their bus after each trip.
Board members were also given a curriculum update.
Students are doing a good job of keeping up with their assignments both in-person and online.
So far, 232 Kindergarten through 12th-grade students has enrolled in the COVID-19 Online Academy option.
For more information about this option or about the school in general, visit gjcs.k12.in.us.
