Cass Lake-Bena School District Receives Grant for Infrastructure Updates

The United States Department of Energy is helping to renew school infrastructure through a new grant, and one local district has become one of 24 recipients of this grant.

The Cass Lake-Bena School District is working with the Region Five Development Commission and will share a pool of $178 million in grant funds with 23 other schools across the nation. CL-B hopes to receive enough funding to cover the roughly $9 million expense of their project, which aims to improve the school’s energy efficiency.

The money would be used to update the almost 50-year-old boiler system, HVAC, and dehumidification systems. The improvements would not only be toward infrastructure but safety.

“Having quality air handling systems also reduces the amount of bacteria and germs and things that are in the air,” said Cass Lake-Bena Superintendent Sue Chase. “Those are some of the things we learned during the pandemic that the quality of the air in the building influences whether or not people get sick.”

CL-B is the only school in Minnesota to be part of the award. The Department of Energy more than doubled its original funding for these improvements to public schools.