Though major renovations to Lehighton Area School District's middle and high schools are over 75 percent complete, the school board tied up two loose ends during its meeting Monday night.

By unanimous votes, the district will add new stage rigging equipment in the middle school auditorium and replace the seats in the high school auditorium.The district chose to wait on both items, Business Manager Brian Feick said, because it felt it could get a better price through COSTARS, the state's cooperative purchasing program, than by bidding the work as part of the overall project."We bid the stage rigging equipment. It came back at $84,000, but through COSTARS we were able to get a price of $37,559," Feick said.That cost includes delaying the installation of the equipment until September, which was no issue for the board."There are no theatrical events scheduled there until the end of October, so the timeline works out," Feick said. "Getting it done this summer would have cost an extra $15,000."The middle school auditorium had housed temporary classrooms while the rest of the building was being renovated. Almost all middle school classrooms have been turned back over to the district.A four-pipe central heat pump HVAC system was installed in both the middle and high schools.Seating will be replaced in both auditoriums.On Monday, the board approved spending $153,789 for the high school auditorium seats. That work will be done over the summer, Feick said."We wanted to wait until most of the renovations were done to see where our project budget was," Feick said. "We had actually budgeted $200,000 for the high school auditorium seats."With the extra money, Lehighton also plans to replace carpeting in the aisles of the high school auditorium.That project, Feick said, will have to be bid as it is not available through the COSTARS program.