Tonight (2017-11-28) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE).
The room was surprisingly crowded tonight. The cause was the presenters for the Mental Health Workshop. Other then that, the only real contentious item was the Solar Tax Exemption Opt Out, which brought no one to the meeting.
Two interesting items happened early on. First, Amy (Board President) did not read the entire verbiage of the Public Comment directions. Eminently logical, as they are way too wordy and everyone in the room either was there for other reasons or knew the drill from past meetings. And second, she informed all that at the next meeting there will be a decision on whether HFL will be joining the Urban-Suburban Program. Considering everyone in the room should already know that, this was likely a bit of CYA.
With that out of the way, Gene (Superintendent) opted to skip his report so that we could get to the main event: The Workshop on Mental Health.
The workshop started with five students talking about their ‘Stand By Me’ club. They shared their thoughts and first hand experiences with bullying. A nice enough presentation, although some of the girls clearly had little practice speaking to a group. Not a problem in context, after all school is for learning.
It was during their speech that I noticed all the extra people in the room were female. It wasn’t until the last part of the workshop that they added a male member to the group. I have no idea if this means anything or not, but it struck me as worth noting.
After this, we broke into groups for the next two sessions. The first one I attended was called “Mental Health”. While they talked about their Second Steps, Zones of Regulation, Peace Circles, and being FINE, I just got a sense of how Everything is Awesome. While that is good to hear, it left me wondering if there is an opportunity to cut back here. I just had a sense I was missing something, that it was too rosy of a picture.
If anything, the second session (called “Drugs, Alcohol, and Anxiety”) only increased my sense we were missing something important. Despite the name starting with drugs and alcohol, those were effectively non-issues. They exist, kids will experiment, nothing to see here. Except for vaping, which has drastically increase since the E-SHACK opened. On the other hand, Anxiety was a big concern. To such an extent, group counseling was offered at the Middle School. There was even discussion about how Social Media and/or Smart Phones were making students more anxious.
All of this talk about anxiety reminded me of a redefinition of ‘Adult’ I had been thinking about. Adults are those that have been broken by their life experiences, yet have found a way to still function. Children are those that have not (either been broken or learned to function). Not sure how accurate this idea is, may need to ponder these philosophical quandaries some more.
That aside, it seems the focus of the school here is to not miss anyone who is having difficulties. Which is to say ‘catch them all‘. A noble goal, but one doomed to failure, as none of us are perfect. Which may be why I was feeling frustrated at the meeting. It seemed to be implied that we could solve all the problems, if we just found the right tools/method and worked at it hard enough. Which doesn’t match what I Observe.
With the workshop portion done, the board separated for some committee work. Amusing enough, numbers are slow. As demonstrated by the Audit Committee taking longer then the others to finish their work.
Once back together, it was on to the other big item of the night: The Resolution to Opt Out of Solar Tax Exemption. Unfortunately, the poor language didn’t help the situation (Opt out of an Exemption). In the end, as this has no impact on the total tax levy, the board decided to treat all properties the same. In other words, to the extent they can, not unduly move the tax burden from one ‘exempt’ group onto the rest of the community. This logic seems sound, it just took a while to reach that conclusion.
As a final aside, Gene posted a picture of the last BoE meeting to his twitter feed. I found this particularly amusing as I am in the picture.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the November 28, 2017 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.