Tonight (2019-11-26) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
The big topic of the evening was the workshop on On-Line Learning. In fact, it used such a large chunk of time that later on there was a request to table a topic so the meeting would end sooner. Although that might have also been influenced by it being Thanksgiving on Thursday.
It’s probably my bias and general familiarity with the topic, but I was not impressed with the On-Line Learning workshop. I can overlook the reading straight from slides, as that happens all too often, but the usage of online tools felt forced. While I fully believe there are settings and situations where the tools work well, in the context of this meeting using them as a demonstration did not work well. The conversation when the tools were ignored felt better then what I could see when the tools where used. Mind you, I was also the only person in the room NOT on a computer (smart phone, etc), so that might have been a factor in my opinion.
One of the slides did make the interesting claim that On-Line Learning cannot be used to replace staff. Yet one of the listed benefits was filling in for a lack of substitutes. Sure sounds like replacing staff to me. Might be a case of definitions as pertains to the unions. Substitutes might not be considered staff, despite being employed by the school (or some such). Did leave me with the feeling that, despite a stated desire to change and explore options, there was also an organizational need to maintain the status quo. As happens all too often, especially in larger organizations (see all of human history…).
More members of the PBAC were approved. May lead to seating challenges for some meetings, which is generally a good problem to have. At some of those meetings last year I was the only PBAC member present, so this will be an improvement. Might be going too far in the other direction, time will tell.
Which brought us to more reporting on the NYSSBA Convention. The most interesting tidbit from that was a potential use for the house the school owns. There appears to be a program where various school districts have college students work at the public school as part of their degree program. I’m sure that is a drastic over simplification, but it works for here. HFL’s previous attempts to work with this program have failed because the students involved said we were too far away. Hence a potential use for the house the district already owns: temporary housing for those students. Probably won’t happen for a variety of reasons, but it was amusing when it came up.
On a less pleasant note, the word “epidemic” was used to describe the vaping situation at the Middle School. Not something you want to hear, and it did lead to some discussion about what to do. No solution to the issue found tonight, which didn’t surprise me. Drugs (in all their forms) have been with us for a long time, we’re not going to figure out how to get rid of them in an evening. But hearing the discussion about how the kids are hiding their usage (custom clothing) reminded me about a comedian I heard years back. To paraphrase the joke: Don’t do drugs because they are bad, avoid them because you don’t want to learn how to sew.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the November 26, 2019 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.