The evening of 2026-06-23 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
As it was the last meeting of the school year, there was a theme of wrapping things up. A number of year end reports, bookkeeping, and similar. Including some sorrowful goodbyes to Joel (BoE member) and Mikey (Student Rep).
The location was the High School Auditorium, which I was also at last night. I had three different people tell me about the location change. Having read the Agenda online, I already knew where it was. But the people telling me had no way to know that, so good effort for thoroughness. Wouldn’t want anyone looking for the meeting to end up in the wrong place.
There was an update from the outgoing PTA lead. When she joined the PTA, they had a good amount of debt, which they have since managed to defeat. Now they are working to regard trust. While I don’t like to hear things have gone wrong, I think this points at how to handle it when they do. Acknowledge the problem, fix it, tell us it’s been fixed, then work to do better.
The student board representatives stole Gene’s (Superintendent) updates, again according to him, with listing a number of the items happening around campus as the year winds down. Including graduation on Thursday at RIT.
For Public Comment there was a (I’ve been told there are no former) Marine talking about broken trust and a need for transparency. There wasn’t enough context for me to tell what the source for his comment was. Although there was a similar enough comment at a past meeting, I wonder if it could be the same issue? Either way, there is definitely a group that is dissatisfied with something at HFL.
Annual sports report, which indicated there are ~700 high school athletes. Filling ~1300 positions on teams. Which means each athlete play about two sports. Roughly, I’m sure there are some that play one or three. Still, good participation.
Also annual lunch report, and the linked price change. Overall the program is profitable, which is good (debt bad, as the PTA pointed out). Although I read in the documentation that the price increase is the maximum allowed by the state. Which feels like bad logic to me. Not on the school’s part. No, the bad logic is on the State’s side. By denying school districts the option to react to the situation they are in, the district is stuck with increasing to the maximum allowed, or risk future financial difficulties. And we can confidently predict expenses will have hikes, even if we don’t know when or what. So until a healthy buffer is established, you’ll always want more money. But this distorts the market, unless the school wants to risk burning money to keep the program running. In my opinion, this happens all too often with regulations. Well intentioned, and perhaps even well thought out, regulations have negative side effects that can be worse then doing nothing at all.
Next years meeting dates were approved. So you can all put them on your calendar, I know I will.
Annual Professional Learning Plan highlighted how past investments in staff training have paid off. In house experts can more effectively train the rest of the staff, especially because they are there all the time. As opposed to bringing someone in for a short event. There was also an amusing anecdote about QR codes, where creating one pointing to a particular webpage increased participation. Because the alternative was having to navigation through multiple layers of menus and such. Now it’s just point phone at image, jump to right page. KISS
And as this is the Board of Education’s last meeting of their year, there was discussion as to who would be filling the President/Vice President roles next year. While the vote at the next meeting might well be different, it’s looking like Lynley for President and Carol Vice President.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the June 23, 2026 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.