GUILDERLAND — Long-running and sometimes controversial Tuesday night school board meetings did not faze the students filming them for public access TV.

They considered it a valuable learning experience. Three of the regular crew have graduated and were commended for their work last week by the school board.

Kevin Thomas started filming the meetings as a sophomore.

“It’s been interesting to see where the decisions were made for the school,” he said after the July 6 meeting.

He’ll be heading in the fall to the State University of New York College at Oswego where he will study broadcast journalism.

His classmate Evan Cobb will go to the University at Albany.

And Max Collins, a third recent graduate, will go to Emerson College in Boston to study film production.

“I’d like to be a cinematographer or a director of movies,” said Collins, who was sporting a Red Sox cap.

“This has been amazing — a blast,” he said of his Guilderland experience, filming board meetings.

Thomas and Collins both said they got their jobs through Nick Viscio’s media club, which produces the GHS Reporter.

Both of them also said that the most exciting filming was during the student uprisings last summer when board meetings were packed as crowds joined two teachers in protesting their transfer from the high school to the middle school.

”We had to keep our cool and keep broadcasting,” said Collins. “We had to put aside our biases and do our jobs, first and foremost.”

He concluded, “It’s pretty cool to learn how to do that.”