The evening of 2025-02-25 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.
Colin (Business) started the Budget presentation off with an update on numbers. In particular, at this point it is looking like the levy limit will be ~3%. Which would gain just under $1 million in additional revenue for the District. Fair warning, those numbers might change by the time things are finalized. But that was his report tonight. Considering past years, I would expect the final budget to raise the tax levy by the limit, whatever that number ends up being.
On the Middle school presentation I have two things to say. First, they have a new interim principal. I didn’t catch his name, but ever since Shawn retired, it feels like we’ve got a new Middle school principal every year. While I’m sure there were good and valid reasons each of these shorter term principals left, it does highlight the value of having someone stick with a job for the long haul. While Shawn’s budget presentations were longer than ideal, he is missed.
Second, there were technical difficulties with the presentation itself. I will applaud the team for putting together a work around on such sort notice (even if it felt like a long time during the meeting). Having said that, it would have been nice if this was tested before the meeting. As the underlying issue appeared to be inconsistent volume levels in the video itself, this could have been more smoothly managed if it had been found before the meeting started. But then again, if you find the problem before it’s a problem, it’s not a problem. As with so many things in life, if this is the worst that happens, we are actually doing pretty well.
As for the High School presentation, this is where I’ve decided they can go too far with the video themes. Yes, the Family Feud theme was amusing. But I think they lost the budgetary focus by sticking to the game show format. On the other hand, the advertisements were very well done.
As an aside, I haven’t really said much on the budget contents in this years presentations. That may be because so much of it is focused on maintaining. Kind of hard to say much when the presentation can be summed up as ‘we want to keep doing the great stuff we’ve been doing’.
And when the presentations were done, 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. Although you’ll want to use the links above for the budget presentations themselves.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the February 25, 2025 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.