The Albert Lea school board approved the sale of $14 million in bonds to Bank of America Monday night to pay for an expansive renovation of heating and cooling systems in school buildings over the next three years

The only school not getting an upgrade is the newest one, Albert Lea High School.

The sale caps off a six-month effort to fund the renovations, according to Superintendent Mike Funk.

Two schools a year will receive HVAC — heating, venting and air conditioning — upgrades, with Brookside Education Center and Hawthorne Elementary School receiving upgrades next year. In addition, workers will outfit each building with more energy efficient equipment.

“With that, we’re going to have energy savings,” Funk said.

The HVAC renovations are due in part to the U.S. Department of Education’s Qualified Zone Academy Bond program. QZAB bonds are federal funding where districts that have more than 35 percent of its student population on free or reduced lunch can get non interest-bearing bonds for building renovations and equipment/technology upgrades. Since the district doesn’t have to pay interest on infrastructure funds, the district saves money on overall construction costs.

In addition to HVAC renovations, the district will receive several new curriculum lessons, which it can review and integrate into the classroom. Due to a public-private clause in QZAB where a private donor must pay 10 percent of the bond issue (or its equivalent), the district must get at least $1.4 million from an outside source to fund the project.

Ehlers & Associates Inc., the district’s independent financial adviser, found two companies willing to step forward and donate curriculum worth that amount: StepWare Inc., which makes the AceReader speed reading products used by the Sylvan Learning Center, and Mango Languages, which will supply Spanish, French, German, Chinese and English software.

“There is a need for both of those,” Funk said during the meeting.

Board members agreed, wondering aloud if the StepWare programs could be used in reading intervention programs and whether Gifted and Talented Education students or foreign language classes could use the Mango software.

In other action, the board:

Heard a review of district health curriculum by Alice Englin, the coordinator for Freeborn County Partners in Prevention, and possibly Cindy Tri, the Partners in Prevention coordinator for southeast Minnesota.

Englin told the board Freeborn County’s substance abuse problems were with alcohol, tobacco and marijuana, with prescription drugs also a problem. In addition, a slightly higher percentage of Freeborn County’s sixth-, ninth- and 12th-graders used alcohol, tobacco and marijuana than the state average according to the 2010 Minnesota Student Health Survey.

“It’s a community issue,” Englin said.

Englin and Tri will speak with district administrators and health teachers about health curriculum and whether it’s research based over the next several weeks. The board is expected to address the issue after that.

Did away with printed copies of the district’s annual calendar. Funk approached the board about discontinuing print copies of the calendar after he heard complaints from office staff over the calendar for several years. Funk said office workers usually encounter problems with the calendar, whether it’s not enough photos to put in the calendar or a lack of donations. The calendars cost about $4,500 to create and are funded through community donations.

The district’s schedule is online and print copies are “one more barrier to the website,” according to board chairman Bill Leland.

“Not everybody does have (a computer), but I would like to see those types of barriers removed,” Leland said.

Though the board didn’t take official action on the calendars, board members will allow Funk to send letters to donors telling them the calendar will no longer be printed. Board members suggested parents who don’t have access to a computer go to their child’s school to receive a printed copy, and Funk suggested a desktop publishing class could create limited copies of a calendar for people who wanted a print version.

Discussed superintendent evaluation models.

The board will go through its superintendent evaluation process next summer and Funk presented evaluation guidelines and example models from the Minnesota School Board Association. Last year, Funk arranged for department heads to speak with board members as part of the superintendent evaluation, and Funk said the board will examine its evaluation process in the coming months so board members will be better prepared come evaluation time. The board also discussed creating a workshop calendar for special session topics at least a year in advance, in order to be more organized.