The evening of 2025-05-27 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
Largest topic of the evening was the annual Code of Conduct review. And most of that discussion was around student usage of cell phones. The students present even acknowledged the benefits of not having cell phones in school. Even as they also noted they would be hard to put down. Which I thought was encouraging to hear. Before you can fix a problem, it helps to identify it.
It sounds like there are plans to bring in outside consultants to assist with future Code of Conducts. Although that might be a few years out.
There was a hiccup with the presentation shared, apparently it wasn’t the most up to date version. While this was quickly corrected, it had me wondering about the version shared with the public on BoardDocs. Because that version felt very much like a rough draft. Which has me wondering what will happen next meeting.
As I understand the rules around Public Hearings for this sort of thing, you can’t approve something with substantial changes without having another Public Hearing. Of course, the word ‘substantial’ can be debated. But when the shared version still includes placeholders, especially for phones? I would expect any final version to be substantially different.
But at the same time, I believe the State imposes a timeline here. For that matter, Public Hearing laws might be different for schools then towns or villages. There are other spots where the laws treat the different municipalities differently.
In any case, I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Apparently lunch will be ‘free’ next year. While I’ll agree that students having food is important, I think this is the wrong way to do it. It could lead the students to believing lunch is actually free. Which it isn’t, someone has to pay. Someone always has to pay, one way or another. Knowing that is an important life lesson. And what is school for if not teaching important lessons?
And there was an interestingly vague Agreement, approved with no discussion. I understand details being confidential, that’s fine. But from where I’m sitting all I know is it involves a tenured teacher. Which could mean just about anything. A nicely worded apology? A yacht? Whatever it is, the public are on the hook for it. Which is fine if it’s nothing significant. Not so fine if there is significant financial or student impact. It’s probably nothing, but you never know.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the May 27, 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.