More September meetings and more bridge demolition

Every year I attend one Rensselaer School Board meeting, the one that does not conflict with the Jasper County Council meetings. In September the Board must present its budget to the Jasper County Council, so it meets at 5:00 instead of 7:00. Tuesday's meeting was lightly attended and seemed to be fairly routine. They approved about a dozen items. Included was the calendar for 2018-19 with three built in snow days and both Good Friday and the Friday before spring break as days without school. Some districts apparently are not building in snow days but rely on e-learning but the superintendent said that they prefer that the students be in school rather than at home.

They also approved a proposal that keeps the requirements for home-schooled students to participate in extracurriculars the same as they had been. That requirement is the student must be enrolled in four classes to participate in extra curriculars. About half of area and conference schools do not allow any home schoolers in extra curriculars, about a fourth have a requirement of three to five classes, and about a fourth have lower requirements. There was one negative vote on this proposal.

The longest discussion was about renting land around the primary school for hay production. The discussion mostly was about whether the contract should say alfalfa or hay or should simply put a height restriction on what was grown there. They decided hay.

They approved some coaching resignations, the hiring of a Kindergarten teacher, and a long list of coaches. The new Van Rensselaer chiller is up and working and is much quieter than the old one.

The second meeting of the evening was Jasper County Historical Society. A top priority for them is to work on the old Parr Post Office building that is now at the Fairgrounds. It is in bad shape. Their current exhibit is Jasper County Schools and there are pictures of the many former township schools on the walls. A person at my table had this picture, which I could not immediately place.

 Here is the same building today. Notice that one of the buildings was painted in the past few days.

 Part of what is now the fitness center appears to have been a dress shop. Where Demotte Carpet is now was a Firestone dealer, the doctor's office was Lee Cole and I do not know what that was, and the building that will soon be the WIC office was Fendig Drugs. You can see a bit of the Rexall sign on the edge of the photo,

I left the Historical Society meeting before the main speaker to get to the County Council meeting. I will write about Council meeting in a future post, but something that may be of interest to readers is that the Northwest Indiana Solid Waste District will  have a collection on Saturday from 8:00 until noon at the County Highway garage on SR 114 and this will be the last collection that will be taking tires. So if you have tires you want to get rid of, you might want to drop them off on Saturday morning.

Paul's Auto Repair has moved from near downtown on Washington to North McKinley behind Standard Auto Parts. Bazz's Eat and Sip used to be located in front of this building.

 Here is a closer look. I have never noticed this building before so I do not know what was previously in it. It has one more bay than the previous location had.

Bridge demolition continues. Below is a picture from Monday

I thought that the sign below was funny given the picture above.

The bridge is really well constructed. It is not going away quickly. Below is a picture from Tuesday.

Finally, here is what demolition looked like on Wednesday morning.

There is a lot of rebar in the concrete. The workers seem to be working 12 hour days.