A Henkels & McCoy utility worker stretches new wiring high above N. Perry Street in Gloversville recently.

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A sign for SUNY Fulton-Montgomery state Highway 67 in the town of Mohawk, Monday, April 1, 2024.

Fulton-Montgomery Community College renovated a second classroom over the summer to offer more capacity for its increasingly popular cybersecurity program, which will add 24 seats for students.

The $85,000 renovations included installing a 96-inch interactive screen, as well as two 75-inch static screens. Professor Martin Waffle said the additional classroom will help better support the program, which began in 2018. Last year, the college received its “Cyber Range” lab, which puts participants through a series of training simulations.

“We used to teach with white boards and projectors, but now everything’s through interactive displays,” Waffle said. “There’s great cameras, and the screens themselves, we can pull [guest speakers up], put them right up on the screen, and students can have a discussion with that person — it’s all designed so that you don’t have to physically be in there to do a presentation.”

FMCC president Greg Truckenmiller said the program has grown since obtaining the Cyber Range lab. He said applications are more than double what they were last year.

Popular Program

“It is a very popular program, and even after the first year, we were feeling the strain of having enough space for accommodating all the students,” Truckenmiller said. “We tackled the second classroom this summer to give us a little breathing room.”

Truckenmiller said the new classroom will help the college offer more sections of cybersecurity, and better serve students.

“It allows the students to interact more fully in the curriculum as well,” he said, “and provides the instructors the opportunity to not only show their own work up on the board, but they can display student work — if a student is doing something particularly good, or if there’s an example they want to flash on the screen and show how to correct something, it gives them greater ability to do those types of things.”

Waffle added that what makes FMCC’s cybersecurity program unique is the way the program has five classes connected to a Comptia Cyber Security certification — meaning that students graduating with a two-year degree could reasonably get five certifications if they sit for each exam.

“They may not want to sit for five exams for certification, they may only want to sit for two, but that would be up to them to follow up with that certification,” Waffle said.

Truckenmiller said that adding a classroom will continue the program’s evolution since getting the Cyber Range lab.

“This is really going to be our second year with this iteration of this curriculum,” he said. “We’ve really adapted it to what’s happening in the industry right now.”

A sign for the city of Johnstown on New York State Route 67 on June 4, 2024.

Renovations to Johnstown Recreational Park have officially begun with the installation of potentially 20 to 30 new parking spaces on Jansen Avenue, in addition to other renovations.

The city’s Department of Public Works is currently doing the prep work, pushing the sidewalk back on Jansen Avenue to make room for the future parking spaces. The renovations are part of a larger plan the city has to update bathrooms at the park, as well as to install new........

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