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Hearing held for Saranac Lake Smart Schools plan

SARANAC LAKE — The school board reviewed a preliminary Smart Schools Investment Plan to improve security features at the schools.

The district will seek funding totaling $620,500, from The Smart Schools Bond Act of 2014, which was passed in the 2014-2015 New York State enacted budget, to make high-tech security upgrades to Saranac Lake High School and Petrova Elementary, Superintendent Diane Fox said.

Upgrades include installing interior and exterior security cameras, access control and visitors management systems at the schools as well as providing connections to the public address systems to integrate with the new security features.

“This security technology will enable a school to lockdown and secure students and staff within seconds of identifying imminent danger,” the plan document read.

“We will do work at Bloomingdale, but we’ll do the work at Bloomingdale, it’s much less expensive, through our regular budget,” Fox said. “So it will have what our other building have, we just couldn’t afford to support them through the Smart Schools bond.”

The district is eligible for $796,558 for reimbursement from the act and will make a second plan for $200,000 in classroom technology to be created later this spring, with $176,058 in funding from the investment plan and the additional money from the school’s general budget.

“We’re actually meeting this next Monday,” Fox said. “I’ve asked all my administrators to weigh in and to gather information from all our stakeholders, our teachers and our students about the best way to actually spend that classroom technology funding.”

The district must prepare a final plan for approval by the board for its Feb. 1 meeting and submit the approved final plan to the New York State Education Department.

The plan will have to be approved by the department and the Smart Schools Bond Act Review Board, after which the district can begin the project and submit reimbursement requests, Fox said.

“We hope that we hit their cycle,” she said. “(The committee) does not approve them on a rolling basis, actually the committee that approves these gets together every now and again. So we hope we are timing this, so that we actually get a reasonable turnover at state ed.”

The board of education held a public hearing Wednesday night to discuss the plan, however no members of the public attended.

The district submitted a required Instructional Technology Plan survey to the state education department on June 15, 2015 and received approval on June 24, 2015.

The Smart Schools Bond Act of 2014 authorized the issuance of $2 billion obligation bonds to finance improved educational technology and infrastructure to improve learning for students.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently announced that he had approved 65 Smart Schools investment plans, including the Tupper Lake Central School District’s $602,000 request.

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