Tonight (2019-03-12) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE), and before that the Program Budget Advisory Council (PBAC).
Full disclosure: I sit on the PBAC, so some of these Observations aren’t exactly from the Audience.
First presentation was from the Middle school. Usually Shawn (Middle School Principal) leads off here, but he had Matt start (don’t worry, Shawn still had plenty to say).
There was a bit of a focus on collaboration, and how that (somehow) interacted with contracts. Turns out part of the teaching staffs’ contract for this year included collaboration time. The hope appears to be that they will see such a benefit that it will become standard, and not need to be explicitly required of them. Or at least that’s how it sounded to me (I’ll be the first to admit my understanding of public unions is limited).
While good progress was being shown with i-Ready, the numbers were somewhat concerning. If I read them right, ~half the students don’t make a ‘years growth’ in a year and ~30% of them aren’t ‘on grade level’ at any point. Hopefully that’s a case of either a new(ish) system just needing more time, or me reading the information wrong. The alternative is concerning.
Usage of Schoology was praised, along with the roll out of laptops to every student. While I’ll agree, Schoology looks impressive, I don’t recall much on this from the High School presentation two weeks ago. Hopefully that building will be ready when it receives students expecting those tools to be used.
Project Based Learning (PBL) looks to be an increasing focus of the Middle School. Considering the other celebrations of student accomplishments, I would expect something similar to come out of this activity. When asked, Shawn agreed, but didn’t have details yet. Fair enough, the school year is not yet over.
One of the slides talked about a PBL Cycle. It stated a plan to alternate, one year focus on ‘Exploring Contemporary Issues’ and the next ‘Making the World a Better Place’. On the surface, this sounds well and good, but the pessimist in me wonders if this is ‘Social Justice‘ indoctrination masquerading as education. As usual, I like to be wrong.
There was a surprising tangent into the optimal class size for the Technology Class (ie shop). Apparently this year is 22 students, while next is aiming for 24. A pair of Board members expressed worry about students safety around the power tools. It was interesting hearing various people try to allay their concerns. Personally, I think it’s a non-issue. With all the focus the district has on ‘safety’ in every other aspect, I can’t believe they would let students have shoelaces, let alone power tools, if they weren’t convinced it was completely safe.
Second presentation was Pupil Personnel Services (PPS), also know as Special Education. They had an interesting opener, try writing the last page of their presentation, with your off hand (ie non-dominant), in under a minute. Seemed like a decent enough way to illustrate the difficulties of those with disabilities. As I didn’t have spare paper to write on, I used Notepad on the laptop in front of me. Might be considered cheating, but I think it illustrated the point just as well. With some planning and tool usage, the difficulties imposed by disabilities can be lessened (if not outright removed).
The number of students that aren’t fluent in English went from 5 to 12, or more then doubled (depending on how you want to make it sound). On it’s own, not that interesting, but when considered against other topics that changes. How does this relate to immigration (illegal and not)? Is making English the ‘official language’ gaining traction? Would doing so actually help? I have no answers to any of those, but found it interesting how national topics I read about elsewhere may well be impacting the local school.
Absenteeism was reported on, in particular a ‘spike’ at the High school, from 65 last year to 80 this year. Or maybe it’s cyclic, as only three years of data were shared, who is to say. Maybe some outside factor creates a long term cycle in absenteeism, and we just happen to be at the high point. Or maybe we are seeing something new, perhaps caused by changes in society/learning/technology/whatnot. Still, it was an interesting data point. If only because it points out how more information could change how an issue looks.
I had an interesting observation while looking at the budget numbers. Special Education total budget is ~$7 million. In contrast, the High school budget is also ~$7 million, while the Middle school is ~$5 million. As the building budgets each include part of the Special Education budget, it’s not an ‘apples to apples’ comparison. But it does give a sense of how big a budget item this is.
With that, the BOE and PBAC split up for their discussion. When I rejoined the BOE meeting, they had either finished or skipped the Capitol Project report. Other then that, they moved quickly through the other items.
There was brief discussion on next meetings workshop topic: Schoology. Looks like the focus will be sharing with the Board what this particular tool can do.
One of the Board members shared about their trip to Albany for ‘Lobby Day’. Didn’t seem to be anything significant to report, except they used verbiage about ‘piece of the pie’. Which had me thinking about playing Warcraft with my brothers in years past. There are two ‘pies’, the civilian economy and the government taxes. The larger the economy pie is, the larger the taxes pie. That assumes tax rates stay the same, as changing them can have odd impacts. Would you rather have 90% of $1 or 0.1% of $1 million?
Back to Warcraft: One brother would start building military as soon as he could, at the expense of the civilian economy. Each resource spent on troops couldn’t be spent enhancing the economy. The other brother tended to delay spending on military until he expected a fight, thus increasing what was available to the civilian economy. In the end, the ‘secret’ to winning was to produce the biggest military possible. And the ‘secret’ to that, was to build the biggest economy possible. And the ‘secret’ to that was to delay and minimize military expenses as much as possible (without losing, which was the challenge).
Back to the state ‘pie’: With an assortment of ‘special interests’ fighting for pieces of the pie, I would think that any action that would grow the size of the pie would be best for everyone. And as government can only take from the civilian pie (ie it can’t make it’s own pie), the lower it can keep taxes, the quicker and bigger that pie grows. Which can lead to the oddity of lowering taxes causing increased revenue.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the March 12, 2019 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.
As has become the norm for this group, Agenda’s and similar information can be found at HFL’s BoardDocs page.