GUILDERLAND — “I feel you need to give back to your community,” said Allan Simpson, explaining why he is running again for the school board. “I can offer expertise with my financial background,” he added.

Simpson works as director of accounting operations for the New York State Insurance Fund.

GUILDERLAND — Judy Slack is running for a third term on the school board because, she said, “I like feeling I’m doing something for the kids.”

Slack, who began her career as a high-school English teacher, worked for 24 years as a teaching assistant at Lynnwood Elementary School in Guilderland, retiring in 2008.

"It's really a philosophical question," says Principal Thomas Lutsic of boosting grades for students in advanced courses, and school leaders are divided on the issue.

For two hours, school board members wrestled with ways to heed calls to restore cut staff for valued programs but ultimately followed the counsel of administrators not to further tap reserve funds.

Community members described Margaret Della Rocco, who died after an accident on Monday, as the center of a close-knit family, raising her four children to work with and appreciate the environment.

"The stuff you sell, you have to work hard to get" is one of the many things Guilderland Elementary students learned by creating business to sell goods they had made.

The Guilderland Teachers' Association was fully reimbursed in February for the over $100,000 that was stolen from its dues but no one is saying where the money for reimbursement  came from.

GUILDERLAND — The day after the state settled on its final budget, with a much-ballyhooed $1.1 billion increase in aid to education, the school board here faced a hard reality: Not much had changed.

When twice the number of people expected showed up to take Civil Service tests at Farnsworth Middle School, the overflow parked in frozen fields that thawed as the day warmed.

Britton Schnurr, the psychologist at Lynnwood Elementary School, being honored with a Champions of Character award, has discovered that the kids most at risk are those who bully.