Plans to renovate the Macomb High School building remain on hold.
That’s because the school district expects to receive revenue from a new wind farm in McDonough County, but it doesn’t yet know how much to expect.
“We’re trying to get a handle on that now in terms of waiting for the developer to give us updated revenue projections,” said Superintendent Patrick Twomey.
He said the school district also needs to know when the wind farm will start providing it with revenue.
“We have great fund balances in this district. So, for instance, if we could see that our revenue stream was going to start in 2028, we could do our remodel in 2027 – a year earlier – and wait for that revenue to come in to begin paying the bond proceeds,” Twomey said.
He said the wind farm will run from near Bushnell to around Industry, and much of it will be in the Macomb School District.
Macomb’s high school building served as a junior-senior high for decades.
Now that there’s a separate middle school, the district intends to remodel the high school’s interior and bring it into the 21st century. The building dates back to the 1970s.
Twomey said the wind farm revenue will pay for both the renovations and the addition of space for a career and technical education program on the high school campus.
He believes the projects will happen almost simultaneously.
The superintendent said the Macomb district still wants to partner on the CTE project with the Bushnell-Prairie City and West Prairie school districts and provide opportunities to their students.
But he “remains firm” about building CTE classrooms on the Macomb High School campus. He said the bus ride to an off-campus site would eat into Macomb students’ schedules.
“Most kids, they just don’t have a class period to give away,” he said.
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