Tonight (2018-01-30) was a budget study session for the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE) and Program Budget Advisory Council (PBAC).
Full disclosure: I sit on the PBAC, so some of these Observations aren’t exactly from the Audience.
This budget study session was at the Middle school. Agenda was the presentations from Music and Middle School. They each spoke on what greatness they had done over the past year, and what they wanted to change for next year. Along with that was a budget projection/wish list.
Mark and Ken (Band and Chorus), as usual, gave a good representation of the music department. As always, they seem to be buried in awards and similar accomplishments.
They played a short video of students working on various projects, with one in particular providing background music. Good showing, but suffered from what I hear as a common problem with music. Namely ‘loud’ is confused with ‘good’. If my hand can feel the music through the vibrating table, and all my ears hear is ‘noise’, then it’s too loud. Having said that, I recognize I appear to be in the minority here.
It was pointed out that most students that go through the music program, don’t pursue a career in music. Much like most students don’t pursue a career in science. Was an interesting comparison to make. On the one hand, of course it’s that way, careers are about specialization (generally speaking). On the other hand, if it’s not knowledge/skill that will be needed later, perhaps it’s not needed. Which I suppose could be said about anything, not just music. “I don’t need to know math, my abacus/calculator/phone/hand-brain will do it for me”, as I’m sure way too many students have said over the years.
The music department has again request two positions be filled (or expanded) next year. Both of these have interesting history’s, only the smallest bit of which I know. They want a full time accompanist and a theatre manager. Decent arguments were made for both.
In the case of the accompanist, I can’t help but wonder if there doesn’t exist a device that could be used for this. Maybe it’s that I don’t know exactly what the position does, but my impression is they play music on demand. Seems like a task ready for automation. If we aren’t there yet, there’s an opportunity for someone to build such a device. ‘Alexa, start song at time mark x’.
The theatre manager is an interesting one. It seems like some of the tasks of this job are currently handled by different people throughout the district, but since no one ‘owns’ the theater sometimes things slip through the cracks. For many of the tasks, there is only one qualified individual that can do them, and he already has a full plate with his assigned workload. I think this may create both risk and opportunity for the district. Risk in that without this individual the performance side of the music program might be negatively impacted, at least for a time. Opportunity in that it might be usable as a rally point for exceeding the tax cap. Not that I’m saying either of those options are likely (or good), just that I see the potential here.
As a final note on music, the Music Boosters Annual Spaghetti Dinner & Square Dance looks to be February 9th, next Friday (not this Friday). Dinner runs from 5:30-7PM, Dance from 7-9PM (or whenever they kick you out). All at the Middle School Cafeteria.
Shawn (Middle Principal) ran the Middle school presentation, although he did ‘let’ Matt speak for a bit. As usual, he puts together a good presentation and handles himself well. Much of his presentation focused on the uses of i-Ready. A relatively new tool at the school, and they are seeing much benefit from it. As always, time will tell how useful it is. I wasn’t the only one there that wonders how the movement to ‘opt out’ of testing might impact this tool.
I was glad to hear a definition for TPACK. This makes the third night of budget presentation to use the term, but no one else had bothered to define it. Unfortunately illustrates again the language divide in the room. I’m often tempted to ask, but the terms are so thick it would easily double the presentation length. So I remain quiet, looking things up as needed, but communication difficulties remain.
‘Teaser’ videos were shared of a story project one of the classes did. That, and the comments from the students, were interesting. Unfortunately, the stories themselves were not available. Which is a shame, the ‘teasers’ teased too well.
As with all the presentations, at the end there were questions. Shawn seemed to enjoy a few of the ones he was asked and went off on some speculation on the role of final exams and the teacher’s role as mentor. Not going to put words in his mouth, he was (more or less) reasonable on those topics. But I will wildly speculate on my thoughts from his speculation.
The mere question of final exams, and the earlier discussion on SAMR had me thinking if there wasn’t an opportunity to redefine what a final exam was. Push it away from sitting at a test and more to… something else. Which is where the idea fails, I don’t know where it would go. Just a vague sense there is an opportunity here.
The earlier discussion on i-Ready already had me thinking about automation, when the idea of teacher’s becoming more of mentors came up. Taken to the extreme, this could be the ‘holy grail’ of education. As with any support industry, the highest calling is to have rendered yourself obsolete. Imagine if the fire department did their job so well, there were no more fires to put out. Or the police had no criminals to catch, doctors no patients to heal, or in this case, teacher’s no students to teach. If the role of ‘teacher’ is no longer needed, and the former teacher is now more supervising and/or advising, it could potentially remove the most labor intensive part of the education system. Unfortunately, this also means those in the best position to implement this sort of change, also have a personal interest in preventing it from ever happening.
After that, the PBAC and BoE split up to discuss their thoughts on the presentations. Next week, High School…
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the January 30, 2018 budget study session for the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
As has become the norm for this group, Agenda’s and similar information can be found at HFL’s BoardDocs page.