Tonight (2018-07-10) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
This was the annual organizational meeting, or as Gene (Superintendent) put it “Happy New Year“. Which means many agenda items, and I ponder how to streamline the process. Took about an hour to get through the reorganization portion, then about half an hour to get through the business portion. There just happened to be about an hour of executive session in between the two. Such is life.
Joe and Carol were attending via the internet. While the details have changed, this isn’t the first time the Board has done this. First time I can recall two people at once though. In the future, hopefully away members will learn to mute their mics when they aren’t talking.
As with last year, again with next year: Amy will be Board president and Carol will be vice president. They did a good enough job last year, I suspect they will manage well enough this year.
As the many items on the reorganization agenda were gone through, I was wondering if BoardDocs could be used for voting. If so, I could imagine it streamlining that portion of the meeting considerably. Everyone could vote on the items, and anything that isn’t passed could then be discussed. Having seen ProxyVote used for stocks, I could see a similar method working here. At least in theory, probably run afoul of open meeting laws in some way.
The new board member, David Ghidiu, abstained on a number of items. Reasonable enough, as he is new to the position it is understandable he doesn’t know enough to make a decision. But he also voted no on a few, which implied he knew enough to consider them bad ideas. Can’t fault him for voting as he saw fit, but found it interesting enough.
One of the agenda items (9K for those of you following along at home) states the superintendent is the ‘primary observer’, and names other people as ‘independent observer’. Fine and all, but the named ‘independents’ directly report to the superintendent. I’m likely missing some context here, because being in a position of contradicting your boss also seems to contradict ‘independent’.
Apparently there are three Teaching, Learning, Technology (TLT) meetings this year. By my count, this is the third year in a row where the number of meetings has decreased. At some point, might as well discontinue the committee. Full disclosure, I do sit on that committee, as the lone ‘community member’.
Item 13X was the annual memberships, and the resulting annual discussion of if the memberships are worth their cost. Seems to happen each year, with a conclusion of ‘we’ll look into it before next year’. Yet here we are again. Most likely have the same discussion, with the same people, again next year.
After the organizational meeting, it was on to the regular business meeting. The first item of which was executive session. As the logistics of videoconferencing brings complications, those of us in the audience left the room. To be fair, there were fewer of ‘us’ then there were of ‘them’. And if staff was ignored, it was just me and Donna. I didn’t mind the chance to stretch my legs and chat. As executive session lasted about an hour, the Board seemed surprised any of us had stuck around.
Not that I can blame them, the business meeting was pretty straightforward. Approved some salaries for next year (most were approved at previous meetings), some maintenance contracts, and accept some gifts. The only item that generated any discussion to speak of was the scheduled meetings dates for the year.
The Board of Education will be meeting on the second and fourth Tuesdays, as they have been. What may change is the budget meetings. The last few years those have been almost every Tuesday in January and February. It sounds like the plan is to stretch them out and add them to the business meetings, but go from December to March. Unclear at this time, will be explained in a few months. I just hope we can avoid meetings ending at midnight. 6 hour long meetings are just too much.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the July 10, 2018 meeting of 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.