GUILDERLAND — The Guilderland school district is forging ahead with plans to spend the $2.1 million allotted to it in the state’s Smart Schools investment plan that aims to modernize classrooms across the state.

It’s not difficult to spend $2.1 million on technology, said Demian Singleton, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, particularly when the money is going for infrastructure. Devices are cheaper than infrastructure, he said, adding, “Without the infrastructure, the devices are useless.”

The bond act approved by voters, in a separate referendum attached to the governor’s 2015 budget, is for a total of $2 billion in technology improvements to be distributed to all of the school districts in the state.

At Guilderland, the district is currently in the process of applying for a total of $1.5 million.

The amounts that the district has applied or is applying to use are, according to Singleton:

— $433,785: Approved by the Smart Schools review board in July, this money will be spent on upgrades to the wireless infrastructure at the high school and upgrades to security cameras across the district. An additional $15,000 was approved recently, which, Singleton said, was necessary because the state took so long to approve the $433,000 that the type of wireless access points that the district had planned to buy became outdated, and the new model was priced $15,000 higher than the old;

— $473,000: Not yet approved by the Smart Schools review board, this money will provide one-to-one devices for every student, first those in the middle school and then those in the high school. These will be devices — Chromebooks — that they use in school and also are free to bring home, which will “provide equity for all our students,” according to Singleton.

The $473,000 also includes upgrades to the middle school’s media center, Singleton said;

— $278,000: This amount would go to upgrading the elementary-school  network switches, or the local area networks that allow internet connectivity, Singleton said, calling this “a pretty significant upgrade of our infrastructure”; and

—$364,000 for a desktop virtualization project, Singleton said, that will allow desktop computers to run off a common server, so that it is not necessary to have programs loaded on every computer. This is critical, he said, for the district’s middle-school and high-school technology courses, and particularly for the high-school’s Lead the Way program, which he said is essentially a pre-engineering program that “gets kids very deeply into computer-aided design and production.”

There is no timeframe for spending the $2.1 million, said Singleton. The district anticipates keeping the remainder in a “kind of reserve,” possibly applying to use some of it  in about the summer of 2018. Some of the money will be used to replenish devices as necessary; they are on a four-year replacement plan, Singleton said.

In the future, Singleton noted, the district also plans to expand Project Lead the Way by adding a middle-school program, to be called Gateway.

Singleton said obsolescence is “very much a worry.” He called the tech world ever-changing, and noted that the timeline for Smart Schools review has been “very much delayed.”

He said, though, that the process of applying for amendments, as the district did with that $15,000, is much faster than the initial applications, since the review of an amendment to an already-approved project does not need to be as thorough.