The evening of 2022-10-25 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
The bulk of the meeting was a presentation on Capital Project Phase 3 and a workshop on Mental Health & Safety.
The Capital Project feels like alot of repair/renovation and little to no ‘new’. While maintenance is important, and periodically necessary, it isn’t the kind of thing I would expect to thrill the public. On the other hand, perhaps large ‘new’ projects would irritate in the current environment. Us people can be fickle that way.
In any case, assuming it’s approved, this would raise the tax rate ~7 cents. Which translates to ~$12 on a ~$200k property. The building would presumably start in April of 2024.
While it wasn’t explicitly stated, the December 13 voting date is apparently an attempt to jump the queue for state approval. It sounds like a number of other districts are also having capital project votes on the same date. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I would assume they are trying to get ahead of the curve and avoid needless waiting from adding this vote to the regular election cycle in May. Being more cynical, ‘special’ elections may be used to manipulate the voters/system. Exactly how that would work I could only speculate, hence ‘cynical‘ as I lack meaningful data.
The Mental Health workshop started with a number of statistics. The one that stood out to me was the ~20% of students who are chronically absent. The rest seemed decent enough, if not great. But we did shut down everything just a few years back. A degree of damage should be expected, if unfortunate. If the worse we get is more absent students for a few years, then we’ve made off pretty well.
As they got into the details and process, it felt too scripted. The mindset seemed to be that students (ie people) are programmable machines. In all fairness, I may have been reading between the lines poorly. And in their defense, how else would it look from the BoE level. After all, we don’t see individual students lives from here. And to some extent we shouldn’t (see HIPPA, again).
Back to earlier portions of the meeting, this was School Board Recognition week (thus cupcakes). Also Bruce’s (formerly Business) last meeting in his official capacity (another reason for cupcakes). He will be missed, but nothing in this world lasts forever.
Brianna, the only student board representative at the meeting, said the students were missing the free food from past years. A bit understandable, as ‘free’ food is always nice. Also never actually ‘free‘, so there may be a teaching opportunity here.
And there was a very interesting public comment. While he did jump about a bit, the core of the comment seemed to be that HFL needs to push back against calls of ‘groomer’ and support LGBetc more. While the details were different, I recall a similar comment a few months back. Which make at least twice now people have felt the need to tell the BoE that ‘groomers’ are not a cause for concern at HFL. Yet I am not aware of anyone making that claim here, not that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. While this may not mean anything, that they felt the need to defend their stance might mean someone is over the target.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the October 25, 2022 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.