The evening of 2023-05-23 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
Tonight was the annual Public Hearings for both the Code of Conduct (CoC) and District’s Emergency Response Plan (DERP). Although there was discussion about maybe moving when the DERP Public Hearing is, or having a second one part way through the year. Apart from that, timing issue, I don’t have anything to say on the DERP.
The Code of Conduct was more interesting. From the presentation, the group seemed to mostly be focused on more and/or alternative consequences. While also noting this moves towards a more arbitrary disciplinary system. Their counter to that was to have each building define their consequences. So more leeway at the district level, while properly defined per building. Which seems like a decent enough balance to try.
There was also some controversy about cellphone usage by students. They didn’t get too far into details, but the CoC committee wanted the Board to issue a policy or similar. The BoE seemed to feel this was best decided at the building level (so a policy could be ‘buildings decide’?). Perhaps limited exposure and learning disciple at a younger age could help here? Of course, that assumes there is a ‘right’ method to use cellphones, and that the school district can teach that (after determining it?). Which may make a hands off approach from the BoE the best one. Personally, I know too many people that can’t seem to put their phones down. Ironically enough, those who are the worse are older then cell phones. Maybe there is a connection there? Or maybe some people are just prone to particular bad habits. I certainly know enough younger people that do the same.
I tossed some comments in at that portion of this hearing. The two that I felt were most important were about cheating artificial intelligence and inappropriate sexual contact.
There was a section of the CoC on cheating, and it said students can’t use artificial intelligence to cheat. I suggested rewording to make it clear it’s not the AI that’s the issue, it’s getting something else to do work you submit as having done yourself. Whether it was done by AI, a tree, or your dog is irrelevant. Don’t submit it as your own if you didn’t do it.
Another section was on being a disruptive student, which listed ‘inappropriate public sexual contact’ as one example. While that would be disruptive, I feel ‘inappropriate’ should be removed as it implies there are ‘appropriate’ kinds of ‘sexual contact’ for students. Which seems like the sort of thing we don’t want to leave any ambiguity on. Especially when some schools are being accused of ‘grooming‘ their students. When they are adults, different story all together. After all, Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal (or so the joke goes).
Those two public hearings aside, wasn’t much that stood out to me. Was the usual cougar pride (yeah Cougar Creations), reports on committees, announcing of Public Hearing on June 13 for a deputy (or something similar), and so on.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the May 23, 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.