The Great Neck Public Schools will use state bond money to increase internet connection speeds throughout the district, install internal cameras into the district’s four elementary schools and replace classroom projectors and smart boards.
School trustees voted Wednesday on a spending plan for the $851,730 the district received under the Smart Schools Bond Act, which was voted on and approved by New York state voters in a referendum in November 2014.
The act called for providing a total of $2 billion to school districts for technology improvements.
“This is the first time in my career that the state is providing supplemental funding for school technology,” school district Technology Director Marc Epstein said. “It is long overdue.”
Epstein said the district developed an investment to enhance three categories required by the state including school connectivity, technology security and classroom technology.
“We have intentionally selected projects that have long replacement cycles,” he said. “Knowing that budgets are severely constrained by the tax cap, we purposely looked several years ahead to fund necessary projects that would have been costly to include in our budget.”
In the school connectivity category, the district will spend $398,000, or 47 percent, of its allocated money on replacing aging network equipment and increased internet connection speeds for schools throughout the district.
The district will spend $173,000 to install cameras inside the district’s four elementary schools.
The final $280,000 will be spent on a pilot program to begin replacing classroom projectors and smart boards with new flat-panel displays.
Epstein said the replaced projectors and smart boards would be kept as replacement devices for when they are needed.
Also at the meeting, board President Barbara Berkowitz said the district was looking for ways to include the Lunar New Year as a holiday on the school calendar for future years.
“We’re continuing to investigate ways to incorporate this holiday into the calendar,” Berkowitz said. “While no decision has been made, and there’s no announcement coming tonight, I want you all to know that this is still something we are very much looking into.”
At the Jan. 11 board meeting, members of Great Neck’s Asian-American communities called on the Great Neck Board of Education to consider adding the Lunar New Year as a recognized holiday for students to have off from school.
Mimi Hu, communications committee chair for the Great Neck Chinese Association, and Father Joseph Pae, representing the Great Neck Korean Civic Association, said the Lunar New Year, the first day of the new year in the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar, is the most important holiday for their communities.
Various other school districts in the country have begun recognizing the Lunar New Year as a holiday including the New York City and San Francisco school districts.
