Tonight (2017-08-08) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
Fair sized number of agenda items, moderately long discussions, but a relatively straightforward meeting. Mostly focused on preparation for a new school year. Yes kids, school is coming for you again.
They almost didn’t have a quorum to start the meeting with. A few more board members trickled in as time went by, but it was tight there at the start. Maybe one of the reasons they structure the agenda the way it is, the earlier stuff tends to be more general information then critical actions. Still useful stuff to know.
For example, we got to hear about Gene’s (Superintendent) trip to Disney and how he had to leave his family to come to the meeting. Which was good, as he had much to share. Such as a poll he participated in on his trip, which showed Invisibility was the most desired super power. I wonder what that says about people and/or our surveillance society.
He also gave a preview of his opening day speech. Likely as both practice for him and for the board’s information, in case some of them can’t make it that day. It came out in that speech that in parts of the world it is harder to find water then technology (ie computers). Which prompts the question, is that true at HFL too? They did have issues with some of the pipes having lead in them, which might make the answer ‘yes’. Or it might have been fixed, not sure on the schedule of that.
In part of approving new year contracts, agreements, etc, a new food services head is being hired. Last I observed on the previous one, she was being criticized for poor menu choices. Hopefully that didn’t prompt her to leave, I thought she handled her job well. With all the restrictions placed on her by others.
A future sidewalk connecting Middle school to the Villages sidewalk is being planned. Sounds like it should be done by the end of the month. I’m sure the governor is happy the School and Town are working together on this one. Personally, never saw the point with the existing service road connecting Middle to Manor. But others clearly disagree with me, which is fine.
Final approval of the tax rates was on tonight’s agenda. Interesting bit was one of the board members was surprised there are nine (9) towns in the district. 7 of those are just small chunks of those towns. Which raises the question again, why doesn’t the district swap territory with neighbors to lower that number. If nothing else, it should simplify administrative overhead.
There was a big long discussion about future workshops. The board is planning for four of them, and tonight they were trying to plan the topics. Which lead to discussion of the topics, to figure out what exactly they wanted in the workshops. Final approval is pushed to the next meeting, but there will be a workshop on ‘Alumni’ and another on ‘Mental Health’. What all those two topics will entail remains to be seen.
On that note, the next meeting was rescheduled. As has been mentioned before, not a fan of that. But in this case it works. Instead of meeting on August 22nd at 7PM, they will meet that morning at 7:30AM. Considering past meetings, it will likely be ~10 minutes long. Approving those last things that need to be done before the students swarm the building.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the August 8th, 2017 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
As has becoming the norm for this group, Agenda’s and similar information can be found at HFL’s BoardDocs page.