COAL CITY — The Coal City Community Unit School District #1 board last Wednesday hired Lucas Krippel to be the assistant principal at Coal City High School. Current principal Mitch Hamann will retire at the end of the school year, and current assistant principal Chris Spencer will become the principal.

Krippel is currently a teacher at Prairie Central High School in Fairbury. He will start July 1 with a one-year contract for $77,000 and the same benefits as the teachers in the district. Krippel has his counselor's endorsement, and he is a special education teacher who will earn his special education director's endorsement this summer. He has also been a baseball and softball coach at Prairie Central.

"Lucas brings a lot of different skills to the job," Coal City superintendent Dr. Kent Bugg said. "He was personally recommended by Chris Spencer, and I think he and Chris will work very well together. We are excited to have him coming aboard."

Also at the meeting, the board approved the SAT Improvement Plan, which is a plan to improve students' scores on the SAT test.

"I presented the scores to the board at the Nov. 7 meeting," Bugg said. "They aren't bad at all, but we do think we can do better. The board approved the plan, and now we have the challenge of implementing it. We want to improve the scores in math, English and science. The SAT is a high-stakes test for the students, and we want to give them the best chance to succeed."

The board also approved a contract with the Illinois Association of School Boards to manage their online policies.

"We have been putting our policies online for a few years," Bugg said. "But they have just been in a PDF format. This new contract will allow us to make it more interactive. Now, users can use a keyword search to find what they are looking for rather than having to read through the entire PDF. The board's goal is to be as transparent as possible, and they felt that the $2,500 a year we will spend on this is worth it to make it a more user-friendly environment."

The board also approved the following: accepting a grant from the Professional Development Alliance, filing of the Drop Out Report with the Regional Office of Education for the quarter ending January 1, 2019, the agreement between the Board of Education and the Grundy County Health Department for the shared use of the former Administration Building as presented and approved the amendment to the agreement with Help for Hope, accepted the donation of a Winter Guard tarp from the Music Boosters, accepted a $250 grant from the Learning to Give for the Elementary School Art Walk for the Animals project and approved the registration, cafeteria, athletic, camp and miscellaneous fees for the 2019-2020 school year.