Tonight (2017-06-13) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
There was an irate mother at the meeting, to complain about how the school had handled some incident. Details were sketchy, but from pieces mentioned I suspect one of her children was bullied while on the school bus. To the board’s credit, they did try to help her. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to satisfy her. While I’m not a mother, the desire to protect your children is understandable. Unfortunate that this issue occurred, but fortunately this sort of thing does not happen often. Or if it does it’s kept quiet, which is a whole other sort of problem…
That was followed by the more upbeat Diversity Awards. While it is always nice to hear about the good that is being done in the district, I think framing it as ‘Diversity’ is counter productive. We should be focused on helping people because they are the same as us, at a fundamental level. Not focusing on the ways we are different. We have more in common then different, yet there is too much focus on that which divides us. Still, I can’t fault applauding good deeds.
After that was the first review of next years Code of Conduct. On the Agenda this was labeled as a ‘Public Hearing’, but it’s the first time I can recall the public not being invited to comment at a ‘Public Hearing’. In any case, a collection of things were changed, big and small, from last years CoC. I’ll have to read through it more thoroughly before next meeting, but one tidbit did jump out at me.
Last year included ‘threatening’ under ‘Bullying’, this year it is ‘unauthorized threatening’. Which raises all sorts of fun questions. How does on get authorization to threaten students? Who authorizatize these threats? By what authority does the authorizing agent grant said authorization? And perhaps most importantly, if ‘unauthorized threatening’ is considering ‘Bullying’, does ‘authorized threatening’ become ‘approved harassment’? The crazy things that happen when we try to write rules to cover everything. ‘Love one another’.
I have noticed a trend occurring. Yet again Gene (Superintendent) managed to have his report take up the largest portion of the meeting, while he personally spoke the least. As before, this was done by nesting other presentations inside his. In particular, Art and Math Program Evaluations.
While much of the content was similar to the PBAC content, the perspective was different. Instead of a summary of what has happened so far this year, with a focus towards future budgetary wants, it was a more measured breakdown of the programs and how we compare to other schools. Very similar topics, yet enough difference. Or at least that’s what someone felt.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the June 13th, 2017 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
As is becoming the norm for this group, Agenda’s and similar information can be found at HFL’s BoardDocs page.