Central Florida schools are back this week after Hurricane Milton, with many districts considering how to make up missed instructional time.
Orange County Schools will have their makeup day on October 25, while Marion County Schools has picked November 25 for theirs.
Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said most districts will be making those decisions about how to make up for lost time this week.
“They may take a teacher work day and make it a student day, or they may have to take away another holiday that was already scheduled. I know a lot of districts often identify Thanksgiving week as a time where they might make up time,” said Spar.
Brevard County Schools said students won’t have to miss Thanksgiving Break, as they’ll make up for lost class time in other ways.
However districts decide to shuffle around the instructional hours, Spar said the physical and emotional toll on students and teachers from two back-to-back hurricanes can not be denied.
Teachers have a lot of makeup work of their own to do as many school districts were preparing to end the first quarter, which means finishing up grades and report cards.
And there’s the storm-related trauma many students and staff might feel.
“What we shouldn't ignore either, is there is a mental and physical toll in the sense that parents and teachers and staff in our schools quite often as well as students have had maybe damage sustained to their home. They were without power for multiple days. They had to clean up their yards. So there's definitely a lot of angst,” said Spar.
Rajni Shankar-Brown is an education professor at Stetson University. She said there were power outages and lots of damage on the campus of her university.
Plus she’s had to juggle damage to her home from Helene and Milton.
Although Shankar-Brown said she’s grateful that her family are safe, it’s still a lot to deal with, as she headed back to campus on Monday and classes restart on Tuesday, and she’s not alone in this.
“There is so much psychological stress that happens with hurricanes and natural disasters, and often, we don't allocate time for healing within the curriculum and within the pace of the lives that we live. And yet, providing that time for healing to be able to experience emotions, even grief and loss that so many of us experience in all sorts of ways is really vital,” said Shankar-Brown.
Shankar-Brown said in the short-term, many school administrators at K-12 schools and public universities in the state have to grapple with physical damage to school buildings from the storm.
And then, there are the students and teachers themselves who have been displaced by destruction to their homes, if they had homes to begin with.
“Hurricanes, of course, increase housing instability for many families, and you know that results in additional academic barriers and hurdles, and Hurricane Helene and Milton already led to displacement of families in so many states, including in Florida, and we're starting to see the results of that leading to decreased enrollment and instability in ways within the wider school community,” said Shankar-Brown.
The Florida Department of Education told schools after Helene that it would use an alternative window to calculate fall enrollment numbers, so hurricanes would not skew these numbers.
The state is also extending deadlines for progress monitoring, but so far has not reduced required instructional hours for schools.
For more information on when schools in Central Florida are reopening click here.
