The most important change in preparing for an active shooter is that faculty now has options. Formerly, the only choice was to go into lockdown. Now teachers can choose something different, like having students leave the school, which Guilderland High School Principal Michael Piscitelli said was “super powerful.”

More than a fifth of Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s secondary students were quarantined last Friday.

“It’s at the core of our operation in terms of teaching and learning, and has become even more so since the pandemic,” Superintendent Marie Wiles of technology. “But it also touches our heat, our phone system, our fire-alarm system, our transportation system. We can’t take attendance without technology.”

The Voorheesville School Board at its November meeting partially reversed a rule it had established just last month.

“The majority of school districts in the capital area, they are not allowing indoor use by outside organizations; they’re not allowing indoor use during high or substantial transmission rates,” Voorheesville Superintendent Frank Macri said on Oct. 4.

With students back in full force this year, staying three feet rather than six feet apart, mask-wearing becomes more important.

The board decided to add cooling for Guilderland High School and Lynnwood Elementary School at a cost of $215,166 and also to add top priority projects — totaling $4,105,829 — for the middle school and high school that hadn’t made the cut in the current capital project, including bathroom renovations and ventilation.

The original plan, presented July 1, had been modified to include roughly $770,000 from federal pandemic allocations. This would reduce the annual tax increase from the original $64 for the median $299,000 house in Guilderland to $52. “I think we should ask for more in the capital project …,” said school board member Rebecca Butterfield; several board members agreed.

District residents will vote on the school budget on Tuesday, May 18, as well as on a bus purpose proposition and a school board candidate, who is running unopposed.

“Our community can rest assured that we are taking all appropriate precautions to restore our systems in a safe and secure manner and we will be incorporating additional technologies into our cybersecurity program as we move forward,” said Guilderland Superintendent Marie Wiles.