Tonight (2017-01-10) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE), and before that the Program Budget Advisory Council (PBAC).
Full disclosure: I sit on the PBAC, so some of these Observations aren’t exactly from the Audience.
This was the initial budget process overview meeting, a general ‘this is how things are going to happen’ sort of thing. Only one person in the room was new, so for most of the people it was review from past years.
That being said, some interesting details came out. It was said that approximately 87% of the budget is out of the districts direct control. That portion is controlled by contractual expenses on various things. I have mixed thoughts here.
On the one hand it acknowledges that, for the most part, only a small portion of the budget is easily adjusted. As such, this could be discouraging for those involved in the process, as it could foster the view that those in ‘control’ have no real control of the situation. Or it could help them focus there effort where it could be most effective.
On the other hand it ignores that, should they decide to rock the boat, ALL of the budget is adjustable. Just need to do something outside the box, and then convince the community that it’s the proper choice. And in doing so, be motivated by the fact that the board of education is elected to do a job (not allow outside interests to dictate their actions). Long term, probably for the best, but short term extremely difficult.
Rant off, on to other items…
Bruce (Business and Operations) listed a collection of assumptions the budget planning was built upon. Things like the various aid programs (state and federal), reliability of state budget, etc. Then Gene (Superintendent) gave a nice speech about how, politics being politics, all those assumptions may well be wrong (especially this year). I generally like it when Gene makes speeches on things, and this was no exception. He is well informed and pragmatic at the same time.
The district spends ~$4.5 million on debt each year. While it’s a long term solution, I think the more that number can be lowered, the better for all of us.
One of these days I’m going to find someone at the school that can tell me if their “Plan, Do, Study, Act” loop is deliberately based on the OODA loop. I’m reminded of this on many a presentation where I see the logo again, tonight was no different.
In the past, budget presentations have been a bit of alphabet soup. So many acronyms, with no explanation. Works fine for people that live it, but not so much for people on the outside. I bring this up, because the acronyms used in the presentation were first used as words, with the abbreviation in parenthesis. Gives those with less experience the opportunity to learn as they read. We’ll see if this was a fluke or the start of a trend. I’m hoping it becomes a trend.
And that was the end of the PBAC portion of the meeting. There was a short break (with cookies) and then the BoE meeting proper started. Which put me back in the audience.
While this was a short Board meeting (by their normal standards), it still had a few interesting items.
The board is changing their document system, and they will be having training for that. Most likely March 30th. Not sure if it will be a public meeting or not. I hope so, I would like to see how the intersection of public boards and computer training are handled here. We’ll see…
A policy was approved involving medicine on campus. Nothing of interest there, except that sunscreen is apparently considered a medicine. Got to be a story there somewhere.
Another policy (not a new one, like the above) states that fund raising for school affiliated field trips requires board approval. A group was asking for that approval, and they got it. There seemed to be no doubt about giving it to them, but there was discussion about how rarely they see these requests and yet how frequently fund raising is happening. I would expect this to lead to a policy rewrite, because I doubt they will want to have to delay/deny fund raising due to needing to approve it first. Or not, wouldn’t be the first time fund raising led to bad rules.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the January 10th, 2017 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
Link to agenda on school website.
Link to agenda stored on this site, should the school lose their copy.