TAMPA, Fla. — With school out for the day because of Hurricane Dorian, some families chose instead to spend time around schools of fish at the Florida Aquarium.
Joseph Lanahan was in town to visit his son, Lucas. The extra day meant more father-son time.
“Just so much more time to hang out and have fun. Are we having fun? Yea? So you know, you need to make the most of these situations and they were cautious and they gave us the extra day together. So we are going to enjoy it,” Lanahan said.
A day off for students was still a morning of hard work for some teachers.
“The classrooms were in disarray. The furniture was pushed all to one side of the classroom, desks were pushed away, computers had been stored away and locked up," Hillsborough County Public Schools teacher Trevor Ferguson said.
Although it is a gorgeous day here in Tampa Bay, and luckily Hurricane Dorian is not threatening us or preventing us from getting back to school, there are other factors at play. For one, it’s a staffing issue.
Last week, 2,400 employees at Hillsborough County Public Schools were told they were going to have an extra-long weekend with both Monday and Tuesday off. If even 10 percent of them could not get back to school, that would be 2,400 people missing from the Hillsborough County School system.
And another issue are the classrooms: Teachers need time to convert their shelters back into functioning rooms.
“On Friday, we had gotten notice from the district that we needed to be ready to activate as a shelter in case this unpredictable Dorian ended up coming our way,” Ferguson said. He works at Lake Magdalene Elementary school as a 4th-grade teacher. He volunteered to stay late on Friday to get everything in place.
“You know, a lot of teachers were preparing to do Labor Day weekend plans, but my principal asked anyone who’s available to assist the kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd-grade teachers to prepare their rooms,” Ferguson said.
Luckily, the shelters ended up not being needed but it takes time to prepare a school to be a shelter, and it also takes time to put classrooms back together.
“About 30 teachers and staff members who came back in to start putting back the rooms. Desk needed to be put back together. Tables had to be brought back to the correct area of the room. Zip ties had to be removed, technology had to be moved back to where it was supposed to be and hooked back up," Ferguson said. "So that we could receive students tomorrow. Otherwise, if we didn’t have this time, students would be coming back to classrooms in disarray.”
Teachers were grateful for the time. “We spent the greater part of our morning just putting back classrooms. And so teachers were just so grateful for the amount of time they had to be able to do that,” Ferguson said.
But as Ferguson went on to explain, they were also anxious to get back to their classrooms.
“There’s a lot to be done and every day missed of learning, is a struggle for a teacher, because we have to get everything in before the end of the year," he said.
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