One school district’s pain has turned into the Windsor C-1 School District’s gain.
Visitors to the football stadium at the Windsor main campus in Imperial this spring are enjoying the district’s new video scoreboard, which school officials are calling the largest of its kind for a public school in Missouri.
The scoreboard isn’t exactly new, though – and therein lies the tale.
The Daktronics scoreboard originally belonged to the Jefferson City School District, which installed it in Adkins Stadium at Jefferson City High School in 2019.
It had barely been turned on before a tornado ripped through the capital city on May 23, 2019, inflicting serious damage to the stadium, including a small section of the scoreboard.
“(They) had only used it for part of a track meet,” Windsor Superintendent Joel Holland said. “There was a lot of damage to their stadium. The only thing that really wasn’t damaged was that scoreboard, of much account. One little (portion of) an electronic board went out.
“When the insurance company came through, with everything else being damaged, they just totaled everything, including that. And the sign company looked at (it) and there wasn’t a mark on it. They just replaced the (one) board. That’s all it needed.”
The sign company that originally sold the scoreboard and then recovered and repaired it was Piros Signs in Barnhart, which has made most of the signs on the Windsor campus.
Holland said the school district initially found out about the scoreboard, which would have cost $550,000 new, from the insurance company and from Piros.
The district bought the scoreboard from Piros for $266,920.
“(We paid) less than half of what the original cost was,” he said. “I felt I was obligated to tell the board, ‘Here’s an opportunity we may never get again.’ We were in the right place at the right time.”
In October, the Board of Education approved a lease-purchase agreement, through First State Community Bank, to provide funding for the scoreboard.
The scoreboard installation, which included internet connections, began shortly after the football season ended in November and was completed in mid-March, in time for use during the girls soccer season.
The scoreboard is 24 feet tall, 32 feet wide and 4.25 inches deep, with the video displayed by LED lighting edge-to-edge on the entire board. Many other scoreboards of similar size have borders that reduce the size of the display.
Holland added that while Windsor had not planned on getting a new scoreboard, the old one was not far from needing replacement.
“We had been patchworking that (old) one for the last couple of years,” he said.
“We’d been replacing parts; some parts were getting harder to find. It was still working, but it was kind of being held together with bailing wire and chewing gum and a little duct tape.”
The district almost passed on the purchase because of the expense, and Holland contacted other school districts in the area to gauge their interest in buying the scoreboard.
“At the time I thought, from a budget standpoint, (the scoreboard) is going to be more than we need to spend right now,” he said. “But then we were able to do some things, from a finance standpoint, and offset some things going into next year.”
Holland shifted from broker to buyer when the district arranged a five-year lease-purchase, at 1.95 percent interest, through its bonding vendor, L.J Hart & Co. of Chesterfield. The district will make the first of five annual payments in November.
“So it worked out well for us,” he said. “My first inclination was to contact some other schools and give them the opportunity. We got lucky there. We almost gave it away,” he said with a laugh. “(But) the more we looked into it, and the discussions went on, (we thought) from a finance standpoint, can we do this? We started scrambling. It gave us some time to talk and then figure it out.”
Holland said the district will use the scoreboard at its outdoor graduation ceremony for Windsor High School on May 25 and will find other uses for it as well.
“We should have some good opportunity with it, besides just football games and soccer games.”