Tonight (2017-03-28) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
It was a rather short meeting. Decent amount of material on the agenda, but most of it was short and straightforward. Probably spent as long chatting afterwards as the actual meeting length.
May 16th will be the school Budget vote. Also new board members and school buses. I don’t think there is a capitol project this year. I plan to post another reminder as we get closer to that date.
The wording of the resolutions that will be in the voting booth on May 16th were approved tonight. I found it particularly interesting that they were approved, yet the exact numbers are still unknowns. I can understand the logic, as the wording shouldn’t be changing. When the state approves it’s budget, and gets the school the final numbers, they can be slotted in. I just found it humorous.
There was discussion about a number of policy changes, in particular the one pertaining to Freedom Of Information Law (FOIL). Apparently the board is considering changing how they handle FOIL requests. Was unclear what exactly the change would be, and no action was being taken tonight.
The reason FOIL is of interest to me is that I think it isn’t used enough. Or to put differently, any public agency that is covered by FOIL should have all potentially FOILable documents available on their website (or dropbox, google drive, etc). Add new stuff as it occurs, and gradually convert old hard copies to digital as time permits. Then whenever anyone has a FOIL request, the answer is more ‘it’s available now at this URL‘ then ‘we’ll get back to you in a bit’. As the governments business is the public, make ALL their documents available to the public (to the extent allowable by law). There should never be a need to ask for documentation, it should already be available.
Case in point tonight: The board received a packet of documents last Friday. The public could pick up a copy at tonight’s meeting. The information was the same, but multiple delivery methods. If it was all online instead it would be available to the public at the same time as it is available to the elected officials. Things that aren’t FOILable, that would go to executive session and such, would be handled differently. But that is a relatively small amount of the material (or so it appears).
An annoyance of mine pertaining to government in general, not just the school. Happens to have come up tonight and I took the opportunity to express my opinion too the board. Doubtful anything will come of it, but I wouldn’t mind being wrong.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the March 28th, 2017 meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education.