The Culver Community Schools Corporation is moving ahead with lighting improvements. Last week, the school board selected Trane to upgrade the school buildings’ lights to LED technology, according to Superintendent Karen Shuman.
“So currently, we have some very old lighting in the building that may even be original, that are going to be replaced with LED panel lighting,” she says. “And with that, some of those rooms have 27 fixtures in them, and we’ll be able to reduce it down to 16 fixtures, so that’s a cost savings alone.”
On top of that, Shuman points out that LED lighting uses significantly less electricity and the school corporation will qualify for NIPSCO rebates. “We should be able to sustain doing this project and barely impact our budget for two years on capital projects.”
Overall, the upgrades will cost just over half a million dollars. Part of that cost will come out of the corporation’s Operations Fund as a capital project, according to Shuman. The rest will come from property tax revenues stemming from last year’s referendum, since the work qualifies as a safety project.
This comes after several months of research into various potential energy savings projects. In addition to lighting upgrades, the school board also looked into the possibility of adding solar panels. Shuman says school officials have decided that a solar project isn’t in the school corporation’s best interest at this point, but said it might be a possibility in the future.
