This month, the State Education Department announced an additional $14.5 million in funds through the federal Race to the Top grant in support of the Smart Schools Bond Act. Local districts — Guilderland is slated to get roughly $27,000; Voorheesville, about $6,500, and Berne-Knox-Westerlo, nearly $5,000 — will, as the grant specifies, use their share of the money for purchasing computer devices.

The allocations are based on student enrollment. Guilderland is a suburban district with 4,917 students, Voorheesville is a suburban district with 1,172 students, and Berne-Knox-Westerlo is a rural district with 898 students.

The Race to the Top program has been controversial since New York could get the funds only by agreeing to have teachers evaluated, in part, by student test results. The small amount of money that school districts received from the grant did not come close to covering the expense of implementing the tests.

Asked this week how Guilderland would spend its $27,619.96, Assistant Superintendent for Instruction Demian Singleton said, “Very easily.”

“It’s not an enormous sum of money,” he said, adding, “We’ll take it.”

The funds will pay to equip three or four classrooms at Farnsworth Middle School with Chromebooks, which, Singleton said is “cost effective” since Chromebooks cost “significantly less than laptops.”

They can be used with Google Apps for Education, including Google Classroom, which, said Singleton, “has become wildly popular.”

The plan had been to add two-and-a-half classrooms. “Now, we’ll have five-and-a-half or six,” he said. “That will bring us up to about 11 classrooms.” He estimated that is about a quarter of the classrooms at Farnsworth.

In 2013, Guilderland voters passed a $17.3 million project to upgrade Guilderland’s seven school buildings, which includes $1.8 million for technology improvements with the biggest portion, $618,000, spent on mobile labs.

Google Apps, Singleton told The Enterprise earlier, after a presentation to the school board on the subject is “a game-changer, more than any other innovation in education.” He said, “It’s changed the way students manage, create, and organize information.”

Guilderland started using Google Apps for Education in 2009, Singleton said; Google Classroom came out this past September. The only cost, he said, is $80 for the district to maintain a domain; the fee covers two years.

Singleton said this week that Guilderland is striving to eventually have 1:1 classrooms, with a device for every student. “We’re not going to do it in one fell swoop,” he said.

BKW is slated to receive $4,933.60, which David Thomas, the district’s chief technology specialist, said will pay for 10 iPad Air tablets to integrate with Apple TVs in a pilot program.

Thomas said earlier that interactive whiteboards are an outdated and costly technology and, instead, BKW will use classroom equipment that includes iPads, projectors, and Apple TVs. The equipment would support a model, known as a “flipped classroom,” where teachers record their lessons in videos that are available to students on their own time. Ten teachers at BKW are piloting the project.

The district is purchasing through the Northeastern Regional Information Center. “They lined right up with what we needed,” said Thomas of the iPads among several options outlined by NERIC.

Eventually, Thomas would like to have the equipment in every classroom. Currently, BKW has Kindles in kindergarten through second-grade classes. Each grade from third through sixth has a cart with 30 iPads, which travels from class to class as needed, and, at the high school, the science department has a cart with 25 iPads and the English department has a cart with 20.

The reason Thomas isn’t purchasing Chromebooks for use, for example, with Google Classroom, is, he said, “the terms of agreement” specify Google can change or limit availability. “It is the fact that they can change them at any time,” he said of cloud-based products.

The Voorheesville district is slated to get $6,465.76. Rob Carte, Voorheesville’s director of technology, answered the Enterprise through email. He said that $4,940 would be spent on two Chromebooks and seven Microsoft Surface 3 tablets for special education adaptive learning.

Another $1,290 will be used to purchase two laptops for a flipped classroom pilot program. 

“The program is set up so we order from a pre-set list of items,” Carte said. “Whatever is leftover goes back to the NERIC Model Schools program,” he said, referring to the Northeastern Regional Information Center. “In our case, that is $53.54. We also incur a grant administration cost of 2.9 percent or $182.22.”

— Marcello Iaia gathered information on Berne-Knox-Westerlo for this story.