The evening of 2023-05-09 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
Before that was the Public Hearing for next years budget, and with that the Meet the Candidate event. Budget proposal is ~$60 million, with a levy increase of 1.94%. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone paying attention. You likely recently received a flier in the mail with this information.
While listening to the budget presentation I realized I’ve only ever seen these for public organizations (ie governmental). Groups where tax rates are the only real lever they have for changing income. And since the 2% thing went into effect, that’s mostly gone. Outside of my personal budget, I’ve never seen how a private organization (ie business) plans their budget. Would it be significantly different, as they have more potential revenue options? And likely more expense options as well? Or are those details minor in the end?
Besides the numbers, the three candidates running for three positions were there. Which means, baring surprises, they will all be on the Board soon enough. I’ll write up my thoughts on them, and the upcoming vote, elsewhere. But suffice to say, I think they will do the job adequately, even if I do have some concerns.
After that, it was on to a normal BoE meeting. With the usual Board Committee Updates, one of which stood out to me. Apparently the Board can’t remove content to suppress ideas. In context, this came out from discussing challenges to content offered. I didn’t hear ‘books’, but I suspect that’s what was meant. I found this interesting as all the challenges I’m aware of focused on the pornographic presentation more then the ideas themselves. Which raises the question, would HFL treat pornography as an idea they can’t suppress? Or would it be removed posthaste?
Moving away from percent (%) grades is being explored. Instead using something along the lines of ‘part A 10/10, part B 8/10, part C 2/10’. Or at least that’s my attempt to turn the example into words. I like the idea of offering more detail on what was done poorly (and by extension, where effort should be spent improving or finding other solutions). But part of the benefit of a simple percentage was just that, it’s simple. If this gets implemented I fully expect to hear ‘but how is little Johnny doing overall?’ in a few years. Pushing us back towards a simple percent.
Gene (Superintendent) says go vote May 16. Which is also when Cougar Creations is, along with a chicken dinner sale. The chicken starts at 4PM, and goes until it’s sold out. Which apparently doesn’t take long, so you might want to show up early if you want some. Either way, looking at the art work before/after voting is a nice bonus.
Lima (the municipality, not the school building) is looking at arranging a shared service for a School Resource Deputy. It would be shared between HFL and LCS. Or at least that was my impression, this sounds to be very much in the preliminary stages and we should expect more information as time goes on. Also, Gene says to go vote May 16.
A project started in 2018 to review the BOE Practice & Procedures Manual continues along. Now they have put together a three year regular review schedule to make it more manageable. I expect future BoE’s will grumble about the additional work to do, even if they benefit from having it done.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the May 09, 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.