One of our favorite essays is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which contains this nugget: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

No doubt enjoyed by little newspaper editors, too.

Guilderland has about 120 special-needs students eligible for Medicaid reimbursement but only half signed up so the district could get reimbursed for services.

Lillian Lorraine Yonally loved the freedom of flying and, now in her 90s, has fond and vivid recollections of the pilots — all women — she trained and flew with during World War II.

For the first time in eight years, there is a race for trustee as the public library, in the wake of a resounding defeat to expand, plans to map its future.

GUILDERLAND — “I think we’re in an important transition in the library,” said Robert Feller. “We just had a bond vote go down,” he said of the 2012 defeat for expansion. “We have to think about what that means in our long-term plan.”

GUILDERLAND — Barbara Fraterrigo, the board’s longest serving member, believes, “It’s nice to have an old hand on the board, someone who knows the history.”

GUILDERLAND — Currently the library board’s treasurer, Carroll Lynn Valachovic believes her financial expertise is an asset to the other trustees.

GUILDERLAND — “Libraries have always been very, very important to me,” said Carolyn Williams, who is making her first run for the board.

Good works abroad — distributing toys to kids in Costa Rica or spending a day at an orphanage in South Africa — were some of the acts lauded in a YMCA awards ceremony for local high school students.

GUILDERLAND — As the debate rages across the country and around the world over whether digital learning should supersede traditional teaching, Natalia LeMoyne is unperturbed.

Executives in Silicon Valley pay hefty tuition fees to send their children to a Waldorf school that banishes computers. Every student at a poor public school was given an iPad, yet test scores remained low. In a recent debate at Columbia University “More Clicks, Fewer Bricks: The Lecture Hall is Obsolete,” a professor who believed online courses could not replace the intimate interaction between students and their teacher argued against a professor who taught online and said he could reach more students in an online course than in 40 years on campus; the audience voted — electronically — to declare the clicks the winners of the debate.