BUTLER TWP — Butler Area School District is looking to get new buses for its contractor, Valley Lines.

At Monday’s school board meeting, the board decided to apply for up to $300,000 through the Alternative Fuels Incentive Grant through the Department of Environmental Protection for Valley Lines to replace older diesel buses with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) buses.

Heather Bonzo, the district’s director of finance and operations, said the contractor could apply for the grant on its own, but the DEP “would like for the school on behalf of them to apply.” It is a matching funds grant, which would be paid by Valley Lines.

The district has been through this process before to get Valley Lines new buses.

The company already has the capacity to use more fuel-efficient buses.

“I think they have another CNG station, they are just not using it right now,” Bonzo said.

With the school year scheduled to begin Sept. 6 and the ninth grade set to move in to Butler Area High School this semester, the board approved a number of change orders to the construction in progress at the facility.

The construction is adding a new wing of classrooms and an auxiliary gym to the high school; adding room to house the ninth grade class.

John Pappas, project manager for Eckles Construction, said working in construction during this period has possibly been of the most challenging time in his career.

“It is the most mind-boggling time in construction I have ever seen,” he said. “We are very fortunate that we did this job when we did; the prices we’ve seen coming in for projects are at numbers beyond my wildest dreams.”

District superintendent Brian White said there have been no major changes to the migration plan since January, and ninth-grade students will report to the high school on the first day of school, but may find themselves at Butler Area Intermediate High School temporarily.

“We will be utilizing some classrooms in (the intermediate), there will be a shuttle bus back and forth, which we have done in the past, just never to this scale,” White said.

Some of the board members asked administrators and the project manager to calculate how much additional cost has been added to the project after having approved several change orders during the time of construction, to which Pappas and White obliged to have at a future meeting.

The school board also appointed Regenold Griffin to fill a vacancy on the Butler County Area Vocational-Technical School Joint Operating Committee.

Griffin replaces Tom Harrison, who resigned from the Butler Area School District board and the vo-tech school’s joint operating committee in June. Butler school district has four members on the 12-member committee because the district has the most amount of students attending the school out of all the districts in the county.

John Conrad, who serves as chairman for the joint operating committee, commented that everyone on the Butler school board is either on the committee or is an alternate member.

Griffin’s term on the joint operating committee runs until the end of the year.