The evening of 2022-04-12 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
Primary topic of the meeting seemed to be the budget and related issues. Next years budget is ~$57 million, with a levy increase of 1.98%. As an interest contrast, enrollment is down 1.35%.
GoGuardian is being implemented for student computers. Not active yet, although there has been some testing. Long story short: In the name of ‘protecting the children’, we want to monitor everything they do, because they might do something ‘harmful’. I found this rather interesting, for a variety of reasons.
The most obvious being it screams of ‘Big Brother is watching‘. To such an extent, that question was asked. To paraphrase the response ‘no, because we are in compliance with the law’. Which sounds like a good answer, until you realize that Big Brother was also in compliance with the law. In fact, Big Brother was the figurehead of those writing the laws. So no, starting your following the rules does not alleviate concerns of ‘Big Brother is watching‘.
Another is that this only applies to students. Staff are perfectly fine having privacy (or at least the illusion of), but not the students. If there weren’t any concerns around this level of monitoring, then why not apply it to the staff as well? Redact to the extent required by law, then make it available to the parents. If ‘Big Brother’ is watching the children, then ‘Mama Bear’ should be watching ‘Big Brother’. After all, who watches the watchers?
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the April 12, 2022 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
Agenda’s and similar information can be found at HFL’s BoardDocs page. While a recording is also available.
As an aside, I was unable to make it to the meeting when it occurred. Life happens, despite our plans. And while the recording had technical issues in the early portion, I am grateful for what was there. As I’ve said before, video isn’t as good as actually being there, but it’s better then nothing.