GUILDERLAND — Two people who work for the Guilderland schools — clerk Sally Dague and science teacher Alan Fiero — each saw a need and acted to fill it. The district last week announced grants received through their initiatives.

After Dague retired from many years as a full-time clerk for the district, she took a part-time job as the records management officer.

“She manages all of the records we’re required to keep; she organizes them,” said Superintendent Marie Wiles.

Last year, as Guilderland faced another multi-million-dollar budget gap and considered long lists of cuts, Dague’s was one of the areas that could have been reduced.

“She took it upon herself to help us become more efficient, to digitize and organize records,” said Wiles of how the $21,329 grant from the New York State Archives will be used.

“They did cut my budget,” Dague said yesterday. “But this will help...I’m very excited because it’s going to mean our school district records will be more easily accessible.”

The money comes from a Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund that is to keep records safe and make them instantly accessible.

The project will involve converting 31 rolls of microfilmed minutes of school board meetings and 23 rolls of microfilmed Individual Earnings Records to Laserfiche — a document management system. Additionally, eight years of board meeting minutes will be transferred from a software program to Laserfiche and five more years of paper copies of minutes will be imported into Laserfiche. As new documents are created, they, too, will be scanned and uploaded to the new Laserfiche system.

“It will be on a secured network,” said Dague. “And the OCR,” she went on, referring to Optical Character Recognition, “means you can type in just a few words or a name to find what you want.” She noted that finding information on microfilm is a laborious process and concluded of the new system, “It will save both time and money.”

Aside from efficiency and permanency, the new system will save space. “There is only so much room for paper documents,” said Wiles. “To retrieve information, you go down to the basement and wade through a forest of documents. This is a green, efficient approach.”

Alan Fiero is someone who has touted green for his entire career. Fiero has received many grants over the years that have brought Farnsworth Middle School students into the Pine Bush to help the rare and fragile pine barren ecosystem with tasks ranging from girdling aspen to breeding the federally endangered Karner blue butterfly.

He also started a project that brings visitors to the middle-school courtyard, which has been made into a butterfly garden with native plants, complete with tours led by student volunteers.

Fiero was awarded a 2013 Priority Project legislative grant through Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy for $6,000 to support the middle school’s Pine Bush Project and Butterfly Station.

Students participating in scientific research will publish and present their findings at public forums.

Fiero wrote his application close to two years ago, Wiles said, and everyone, including Fahy and Fiero himself, had nearly forgotten about it, so it came as a welcome surprise.

Through years of budget cuts, Wiles said, the programs had survived through “cobbled together” resources, including fundraisers.

The Butterfly Station had a “wonderful level of visitors” this summer, she said, and has been refurbished with brick walks, making it accessible to those with handicaps.

The grant will allow the good work to continue, she said.