By MATT DANIELS
Rantoul Press assistant editor

The Rantoul Township High School board voted to change the structure of the school’s resource officer at its Feb. 13 meeting.

The board voted 4-2 in favor, with members Merle Wilson and Ann Reale voting no and member Roger Quinlan absent from the meeting, of having SRO Kurtis Buckley’s contract run for only 38 weeks of the year instead of the entire year.

Essentially, Buckley won’t be contracted during the summer when school is out of session.

“There’s not a whole lot for him do here during the summer without students here,” RTHS Superintendent Scott Amerio said. “We didn’t really need that, and with how that contract was laid out, we kind of put the village in a bad spot because they could not use him at all the way we had that set up. With this set up, they’ll be able to use him a little bit in the summer. We’ll get his services when we need them during the school year.”

The new contract for the 2012-13 school year is $59,741, and Amerio said the move will save the district about $10,000.  

— Financial update: Amerio informed the board the state is $167,731.42 behind in mandated categorical payments to the district. The district did receive $44,821 from the 1 percent county sales tax increase for the past month.

Amerio said he, along with other area superintendents, met with state representatives Chad Hays, Naomi Jakobson and Chapin Rose, along with state Sen. Mike Frerichs Feb. 10 to discuss issues involving transportation.

Gov. Pat Quinn has indicated the state may not fund all of the transportation costs that are associated with school districts, and have the school districts be the ones responsible for all of the costs.

Amerio said the superintendents gave information to the state officials on how big their districts are, how much they spend on transportation and how much they are reimbursed for transportation

Amerio said the district spends more than $400,000 on transportation ever year, and the state reimburses between $100,000 to $200,000 of that cost.

“If they take that away, we’re looking at ... making that up somewhere,” Amerio said. “When you’re running a deficit budget already this year and looking at adding on to it, that’s not good. Some of the proposals we’re hearing is they’re just going to eliminate transportation funding, which would mean we would need to find some ways to cut back on transportation. It would also mean that we would need to levy more locally to fund the transportation.”

How the district goes about handling this potential problem probably won’t be known for at least a few more months.

“We won’t have any solid updates until the spring session starts,” Amerio said. “We’ll have to wait until the spring session to see what’s out there and how that’ll affect us. Obviously, we’re going to stay on top of the transportation because it’s a big part of our budget.”

— Bullying report: The board heard a report on bullying and an update to the board policy on anti-bullying. Amerio said the board adopted its current policy in 2001, but a law that came out in 2010 said the policy needs to be updated every two years. The board reviewed the policy at the February meeting, and is expected to vote on it at its March 12 meeting.

“There’s more about cyberbullying, which we didn’t see it as much back in 2001,” Amerio said. “It’s very different from the old policy because it defines what bullying is and what bullying is not, which is an interesting part to have in the policy because that’s kind of a hard concept. It lays out those definitions and then what, as a school, do we do when we come across a situation like that and what resources we have available.”

— New roof coming: The board voted to proceed with plans to replace the roof at Eagle Academy. The decision came about after the district learned the elevator in the east wing doesn’t need to be replaced by 2013, Amerio said. That allowed the district to bump up replacing the roof on Eagle Academy, one of many projects the district has slated in the future.

Amerio said the project will be started this summer and should be completed before the start of the 2012-13 school year. The total cost of the project is $69,000 and will be paid for from the bond revenue.

“It lets water in, so water gets into the building, and it’s ruining ceiling tiles in there,” Amerio said. “We’ve had to move equipment so it doesn’t get ruined. It needs to be replaced.”

 — More projects: The board received updates from BLDD Architects, Champaign, and GHR Engineering, Champaign, about the geothermal project. Amerio said the $2.6 million project will go out for bid in March, and drilling for test borefields will begin in a few weeks. Part of the project

The board also approved a resolution to demolish the house and garage at 701 E. Congress Ave. that sits directly across from the RTHS football field.

mdaniels@rantoulpress.com