Last night (2017-01-31) was a budget study session for the Honeoye Falls-Lima Board of Education (BoE) and Program Budget Advisory Council (PBAC).
Full disclosure: I sit on the PBAC, so some of these Observations aren’t exactly from the Audience.
This budget study session was at the Middle school. Agenda was the presentations from Music and Middle School. They each spoke on what greatness they had done over the past year, and what they wanted to change for next year. Along with that was a budget projection/wish list.
Mark and Ken (Band and Chorus) presented for the K-12 Music program. As always, they shared many of the productions the students had been involved in over the year. The musicals are always a big hit.
They asked for a Technical Theatre Manager, which is in essence what facilities asked for a few weeks back, just from a different point of view. Both groups are trying to get the logistical side of using auditoriums handled better. A compelling case was made, and I think there is benefit, but I am hesitant hire someone new.
I view the entire music program as a bonus. It does good stuff, and it’s great we have it, but it’s not a core piece of education. Available resources could be better allocated towards helping students with reading, or math, or similar critical parts of education. Likely an unpopular idea, which is why one person doesn’t get to decide a school districts budget…
Shawn (Middle Principal) pretty much ran their presentation, and he is a good presenter. He gives the impression he will make things go well, regardless of what the budget does. Always encouraging. Over the years, he’s done a good job of pulling it off. While he listed a bunch of things that would be nice to have, he was clear his focus was maintaining the existing program.
A couple years back, Shawn made a compelling case for reorganizing 7/8 grade technology to run year long (as opposed to part of the year). This year he had the two teachers running that program give a report on how it had gone. Always nice to have that follow up on previous requests. It sounds like the change has led to much improvement in the technology class, but caused some homework difficulties in the home and careers class. ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’, hopefully these issues can be handled now that they have been identified.
As always, Shawn takes longer then his allotted time for presenting. In his defense, most of the overtime is spent giving thorough answers to questions. For whatever reason, people have a habit of asking unanswerable questions, which Shawn then does a decent job of answering.
After that, the PBAC and BoE split up to discuss their thoughts on the presentations. Next week, High School…
As happened a few weeks ago, this meeting went a bit late, so I opted to write this in the morning. Hopefully the delay led to a more coherent Observation.