Voorheesville Central School District to digitize old records for first time ever

VOORHEESVILLE, N.Y. (NEWS10) — The Voorheesville Central School District is on a mission to digitize their old school records, some dating back to the 1800s. The district received a grant from the New York State Archives that will help get this process started, all while exploring the history they’ve unlocked along the way.

Voorheesville Central School District Superintendent Frank Macri said the district has documents that date all the way back to when the first school house was founded in 1826. The first document is a small notebook that has cursive writing, detailing various board of education meetings and the school budget. According to the district website, the school opened with a $30 budget.

“Everything was handwritten,” said Macri. “It talks about staffing, how much books costs and it kind of goes through the litany of everything.”

The school was centralized in 1940 where it then became Voorheesville Central School District. Macri said in the school’s nearly 200-year-old history, none of their documents have ever been digitized.

“If anything were to ever happen, we would lose everything, so we don’t want to ever risk that, I mean these are amazing history. This is who we are, we would hate to lose that,” said Macri.

Right now, everything from scrapbooks, to old school budget documents, to board of education minutes are stored in a 420 sq. ft. room. The room holds 175 boxes, filled with over 600,000 pages of documents. Macri said it’s not only a risk if they lose everything but also a safety hazard for the staff that have to go in and out of the crammed space.

Therefore, Macri said he was thrilled to receive the recent grant. The New York State Archives gave the district $72,344 to begin the digitization process. Macri said with this, 393,750 pages will be scanned and digitized into PDFs on a secure network, and 262,500 pages of unnecessary files will be purged.

“1924 is our student records, so part of the grant is to digitize those, and the other part of the grant is for employee records that go back to 1973,” said Macri.

Macri said digitizing will save the district and its taxpayers at least $2,613 per year and also allow for a more efficient records-keeping and retrieval process. Unfortunately, the district does not have enough money to digitize the old scrapbooks and notebooks at this time. However, Macri hopes that can be the next step in their process.

“We’re hoping that we can digitize all of our records and move forward even with these eventually, but we want to start with the most important ones which are the employee records and student records,” said Macri.

Macri believes all of these documents tell a story of their history, where they’ve been and of course, where they are going.

“It’s all about community here, all of these books, all of these scrapbooks bring us back to our history,” said Macri.