CENTRAL HIGH WILL BE MADE COOLER

Work will begin at Central High School this summer to prepare the building for installation of air-conditioning units over the next two years.

The Cape Girardeau Board of Education approved design and engineering work for the project during a meeting Wednesday. School officials estimate the project will cost $660,000 to complete.

Architect Tony Sebek will head up design work and electrical upgrades in the high school and auditorium this summer. The following year individual air-conditioning units will be placed in the classrooms. In the last phase of the project a larger system would be installed in the high school auditorium.

Schools Superintendent Dr. Dan Steska said the project's completion is scheduled to coincide with the opening of the district's new high school in fall 2002.

"We found out we could complete this project much less expensively than we had previously anticipated," Steska said. "It basically went from costing in the millions to between $600,000 and $700,000, which made it very doable."

Following completion in 2002, the district will have fulfilled the master plan goal of installing air-conditioning units in every building. The project is the latest step in the district's efforts to achieve goals in a long-range plan created in 1996.

In April voters overwhelmingly approved an $18 million bond issue to fund construction of a new high school. The building, which will be built west of Kingshighway and east of Interstate 55 on a gravel section of Silver Springs Road, will have an 1,800-student capacity and house grades nine through 12.

The new school will enable the district to reconfigure grade levels at each building. The existing high school would become a junior high building for seventh and eighth grades; the current junior high would become a fifth-and-sixth-grade center; and all elementary schools would house kindergarten through the fourth grades.

Louis J. Schultz School, currently a seventh-grade center and the district's oldest building, would be closed under the new building configurations.