The evening of 2023-03-28 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
There were two workshops, which took up much of the meeting. The first was ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ and the second was to Review Proposed 2023-24 School Budget. And around those were a number of other topics.
Kristin Larsen has been hired as the Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, to replace Renee Williams who retired last year. Kristin seemed happy to be here.
The robotics team is off to Cleveland soon. While the date/time was unstated, from context I almost expect them to be leaving tonight. Regardless, I hope the adventure goes well for them.
One of the student board representatives reported on an outbreak of senioritis. For those of you unaware, this is nothing to be concerned about and is a common phenomena this time of year. I’m sure they will all recover in due time.
The Board recently toured BOCES, Apparently they make parts for NASA there. A comment about pointing people at the BOCES Facebook page was made, so have a link.
Manor school is having issues with students crossing the street to get to/from school. Having talked with Joelle Weaver (Principal), there are apparently five times as many students walking this section of road then in past years. Sounds like it has been an ongoing issue, with more close call then you would want (which is any, 0 is the desired number). It does have me wondering though. If the school is having difficulty, how about the community stepping in? I mean, I’ve got enough other stuff going on it would be difficult to be there every morning and afternoon. But I could probably do one of the ten in a week. If there were nine more adults (parents? grandparents? neighbors?), we could have unofficial but known crossing guards filling in. As I’ve said before (but not here apparently), people solve problems (we also make them, but that’s a different topic). Is this a problem we care enough about to solve?
Those out of the way, as stated above, the first workshop was Portrait of a Graduate. Various numbers and data point where mentioned up front, but the trend in dropping college enrollment stood out to me. This has been going on well before covid was a factor, although I’m sure that didn’t help. At this point, ~80% of HFL students will head on to college, down from ~98% not that long ago. The core question seemed to be what to do about that. And no, the issue wasn’t solved at this meeting. Although there was a bunch of conversation, which may lead to something down the road.
I did find it interesting that the stated desire to send more students to technical training appears to be bumping up against capacity limits at those training programs. While they could probably (and likely will) squeeze in a few more students, there doesn’t seem to be a way to handle anything near the majority of the student body.
It was pointed out how kids have changed, brain structure wise. The implication being we should change to match. But should we? Would it be better to change to correct these changes? Or are these changes in fact desirable? I don’t know, but it does raise questions about the role of education in general (and public education doubly so). If people are changing, does the factory model of schools still apply?
Second presentation I have much less to say on. The proposed budget for next year is ~$60 million (yes, I rounded up, but it’s close enough). Expected tax levy increase is 1.94% (no rounding there, at least on my part). If you want more information, there was a report you can read.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the March 28, 2023 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 will likely be available soon.