Latest local news, weather and high school sports for Tri-State area

KAHOKA, MO. -- It's been a couple of weeks since the Clark County Missouri School District announced they were having to temporarily move students from the Black Hawk and Running Fox Elementary schools because of a mold problem.

But now one school has been cleaned and the second one should get a clean bill of health sometime next week.

It's close to 11 o'clock and you'd think that there should be hundreds of students filling the hallways at the Blackhawk Elementary School in Kahoka. But instead what you've got is a crew from a Kirksville cleaning company wiping down textbooks and materials - trying to clean the mold that was found in the school last month.

According to Clark County School Superintendent Ritchie Kracht, "they have to wipe down every object in each building. They also have to heppa vacuum each book, each desk, each chair, tables, walls. So they have to get everything."

And that process wasn't just at Black Hawk Elementary. They had the same problem with the mold at Running Fox and the cleaning crew started there on August 25th and they just finished up last Thursday. Now the school district is waiting on the results of the air quality tests that were run after the crew finished their cleaning job. But having to deal with 460 students that were moved from both schools, presented a challenge as to how to feed all of these kindegartners through fifth graders.

"We're cooking everything at the high school and middle school buildings. We've had to make some adjustments on the menu's but for the most part we're cooking what we normally do," said Kracht.

He said some things had to be thrown out because there was so much mold on things like bookshelves and some sink vanities. He says 32 hundred ceiling tiles will be delivered this week and that they should be finished cleaning Black Hawk by the end of next week.

Kracht says several companies bid on the cleaning jobs.

He says the bids ranged from about half a million down to what is being charged for this job which is $96,000.