The second budget committee meeting of the annual series took place on Tuesday, March 17, 2026. North Colonie Central School District Superintendent Kathleen Skeals introduced three main areas of the instructional support budget development team, which includes the transportation, facilities and custodial, and information technology departments.
Maintenance: Facilities & Custodial Departments
The meeting began with the Director of Facilities, Brian Craft, who has been with North Colonie CSD for nine years now. The Facilities Department manages over one million square feet of building space and 284 acres of property, including 21 athletic facilities and eight playgrounds. At the start of his tenure with NCCSD, Mr. Craft implemented a strict vehicle replacement cycle that has managed the fleet of 20 maintenance vehicles, as well as various specialized grounds equipment. In the 2026-27 proposed budget, the maintenance department is requesting $140,000 to replace a 2009 Ford F-350 with a snow plow and a 2012 Ford F-350 with a snow plow, both of which are in poor condition. Those expenses are part of a $205,000 maintenance equipment budget request.
Each year, a large portion of the facilities budget goes to some of the things we take for granted, like the maintenance of the aforementioned vehicle fleet, but also everyday items such as air filters, whiteboards, door hardware, paper towels and toilet paper, cleaning chemicals, and more.
The continuation of annual maintenance items includes playground mulch, window shade and ceiling tile replacements, parking lot striping, and abatement work as needed. Part of the maintenance budget will also go toward summer projects, which include resurfacing half of the tennis courts at Shaker High School, replacing the flag poles at Boght Hills and Forts Ferry, repaving the inner edge of the Shaker Middle School bus loop, completing the replacement of water meters, improvements to K-wing bathrooms at SHS and other support for the ongoing Capital Project.
Following his presentation, Superintendent Skeals praised Mr. Craft and his team for the money they save the district by keeping so much of the work in house.
“Brian and his team, the things that our maintenance department can do,” said Skeals. “From abating that room down there in Central Office by themselves without having to bring in an outside company, to handling some of the bathrooms so that not everything has to be contractors work. All of that, while maintaining everything else to keep this district functioning, is really amazing.”
Transportation Department
Next up was first year Director of Transportation Claudine Beck. Beck, who was promoted from Assistant Director before the start of this school year, has had an immediate impact on department staffing. Her leadership and support of recruitment efforts have helped the department go from nine full-time driver positions open to start the year, down to three by the end of March. In addition to the 6,000 students the department serves and the 850,000 miles driven annually, it has also rolled out the new Stopfinder app this school year. With more than 13,000 subscribers, the app has allowed parents to follow their child’s bus route and receive alerts when the bus arrives home or to school. Additionally, the transportation department is slowly rolling out the Wayfinder app, which will provide GPS turn-by-turn instructions intended to assist substitute drivers or new drivers.
The proposed 2026-27 transportation budget includes the purchase of 10 new diesel buses (five 27 passenger wheelchair buses and five 74 passenger buses), totalling just shy of $2 million dollars. With the 2035 deadline looming for zero emission buses, Beck says now is the time to make final diesel purchases to maximize the lifespan of those buses. A 74 passenger diesel bus currently costs about $176,000, while in EV, that same bus is about $470,000.
“When we look at it, by next year, we're past the point where we can buy diesel buses anymore,” said Superintendent Skeals. “If we buy them this year, we're still going to get a good 10 years out of them, but we're buying them for $176,000 instead of $470,000. So it's a lot in one budget, but it's also much more fiscally prudent.”
Information Technology (IT) Department
IT Director Julie Scriven began her portion of the presentation with a review of the technology statistics in the district. This is the sixth year that the district has provided a Chromebook for every student K-12. When it comes to Chromebooks, they are scheduled to be replaced every four years, which means new Chromebooks are budgeted for students in grades 1, 5, and 9 as well as special education students and staff members. The total budget for Chromebooks is $744,500. The IT team is proactive about saving parts, specifically workable screens and keyboards from our Chromebooks being phased out, to use those as replacement parts for any Chromebooks that are broken. This, along with keeping this Chromebook in house, helps save the district a tremendous amount of money.
Most other equipment and technology around the district is also on a replacement cycle. That includes PCs, iPads, phones, security cameras, LED Touchpanels, printers, and copiers among other items. There are more than 14,000 devices district-wide. The replacement cycle for non-Chromebooks is estimated to cost the district about $726,477.
Rising technology prices are of increasing concern due to tariff and trade volatility, A.I. related shortages (Intel chips, memory, high end graphics cards, etc.), security and compliance overhead, and cloud-based software yearly subscriptions.
“Technology prices are crazy. I mean, absolutely crazy right now, and it's very scary,” said Director of Information Technology Julie Scriven. “We have done our very best on this budget to put what we estimate now, the cost for things are, but I am not sure, even by July 1, that that's going to be the case.”
The current market has changed the game when it comes to purchasing technology in large quantities, like North Colonie does as a public school district. In the past, product quotes from companies would last two months. Scriven says that’s not the case any longer, as changes in vendor practices have added difficulties into creating a budget estimation for the IT department.
“Just to give you an idea of what we're facing, a couple weeks ago, our vendors started sending us quotes that had two week expiration dates on them,” said Scriven. “So normally, back in the day, we'd get a quote around now, and July 1st, that same quote would be good. Now, they're only saying two weeks.”
Additional proposed purchases from the IT department come in the area of network and infrastructure equipment, a large portion of which will be spent on replacing and upgrading wifi access at the high school and middle school. There are also servers and switches that need to be purchased, fiber, storage and emergency backup network at all school buildings in case of an emergency when the network is down. The total network and infrastructure equipment budget is approximately $355,764 with estimated eRate and BOCES aid factored in.
The Smart Schools Bond Act, which was approved in 2014, authorized the issuance of funds to go toward improved technology and infrastructure to improve learning and opportunity for students across New York State. Of the original $1,838,380 designated to North Colonie CSD, we have spent $1,297,285. As concern grows about how long SSBA funds will remain, Scriven has spent time coming up with ideas for what technology requests could use that funding, knowing that the application and approval process for SSBA can take up to one year. Some of her ideas include security cameras, servers, Viewsonic touch panels, and Cintiq drawing tablets and Movink pads for some of our art and business classes.
“A little over a year from now, we've got cameras that we need to replace, and we have infrastructure for those cameras. So, the servers that house all that footage also will need to be replaced,” said Scriven.
The district’s third and final budget committee meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 31 at Shaker Middle School at 6 p.m.