The evening of 2024-01-23 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE), and Program Budget Advisory Council (PBAC).
Full disclosure: I sit on the PBAC, so some of these Observations aren’t exactly from the Audience. Before the budget presentations a variety of items were covered during the Board meeting.
Two ‘monthly treasurer reports‘ were presented to the BoE. Unfortunately, the cash flow graph was missing. This chart showed the current years cash flow, in comparison to the past four years. Wasn’t anything amazing, but it gave a general sense of how things stood and I liked it. Time will tell if this is a new approach, or if it will be back.
The Building Condition Survey was approved. While this is mandated by the state, it does seem prudent to do periodically. I for one would rather the survey finds a surprise, than a surprise finds the students.
There is an eclipse coming in April (for those of you living under a rock). The suggestion was made to stay off the roads that afternoon. Because of the sudden darkness and the expected influx of visitors. Again, prudent, but something I’m inclined to do anyways.
To kick off the budget presentations, Colin (Business) gave an update on various things, primarily being the governor’s draft budget. Long story short, school aid is down. Or at least lower then expected. How much seems to depend on how you torture the numbers, being either -~3% or +~1.5%. It felt to me like the state (or at least the governor) is playing games with aid formulas. To her credit, it looks like she is trying to balance her own budget. That is commendable enough. But it highlights to me, once again, that relying on the state is dangerous at best. If I was in a business relation with someone that acted like this, the relation would likely end. Shame that isn’t an option for the District (or is it?).
First budget presentation was from Manor, which had a Hogwarts theme going on. Fitting enough, as loyalty and hard work seem to apply well here. Perhaps more importantly, the colors match. Besides that, what stood out to me the most was the desire to maintain. While they did ask for things in the budget (nurse, teacher on special assignment, software, etc), it came across as more maintaining current methods instead of going for something new. Even while that was said, their budget is going up just shy of 6%. In part because of inflation, but also because some of what they have now was covered by grants last year. Now it has to be covered by the operating budget.
On the plus side, Manor is considered a model Professional learning community (PLC) school.
Second budget presentation was from the Special Education department, and they were looking at ~9% increase. As was pointed out in various ways, the students covered here have significantly higher per pupil costs then the rest of the student population. I didn’t hear anyone say that shouldn’t be the case. But a recognition that this does eat up a good chunk of the budget. Apparently HFL is popular for this service. Which is a pro in that the service is that good. But a con in that there is a cost.
At which point the PBAC broke out for their discussion. As usual for budget meetings, the BoE had finished the public portion of their meeting by the time the PBAC had finished.
And once again, the recording is available for watching… Having done that…
There was much discussion on special education. It’s costs, enrollment, and so on. From which comes the quote of the meeting: “It runs us, we don’t run it“. In context, they weren’t saying that happens, but identifying the risk if not managed well. I expect there will be a Board workshop on this before too much longer.
Many policies were review, starting with ‘Workplace Violence Prevention‘. Which boiled down to ‘HFL follows the law’. And set the tone for the rest, which felt like streamlining more then anything else. Little to no meaningful change.
After much talk over the years, a committee is being put together to explore adding a financial literacy requirement to graduation. Not setting a date yet, and many questions to be answered first. But this moves beyond just saying it’s a nice idea, and starts down the road that might actually make it happen.
As an aside, the Agenda used multiple font sizes. By word count, ~44% of the Agenda was significantly smaller then the rest of it. Those words were likely there for legal reasons, and have no real value to the agenda, now take up less space. I approve, less distraction to get to the important parts.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the January 23, 2024 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.