During the regular meeting of the Cherokee County Board of Education Monday afternoon, Russell Jacoway, coordinator of the Cenergistic Energy Program for the Board, updated them on the progress made in the School System.

His report included a 48 percent overall energy reduction savings and during the past 6 months, energy consumption was down 55 percent. Jacoway told the Board, before the program began, the system was consuming 32, 182,000 KBT units and now that is down to 16,726,000 KBT units. In real dollars, after all expenses, the Board of Education has saved $3,670,657.  Jacoway said this was enough savings in electricity and natural gas to energize all buildings in the system for 6.8 years.

He said most of the manual thermostats had been replaced with digital programmable units which is greatly enhancing the savings.

He said the maintenance department and all employees helped make this savings possible.