Guest Commentary: Community comes together in wake of Hurricane Ian
As we enter our third week post Hurricane Ian, the School Board continues to acknowledge the significant loss and suffering experienced by many in the School District of Lee County community. District and school leaders, staff, students, families, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and the entire community, all were disproportionately impacted by Hurricane Ian.
Despite the individual situations that everyone is facing, all have come together for the benefit of our students, staff, and community. Even employees of other Florida School Districts that have faced their own challenges post-storm, have gone to extraordinary lengths to support our educational community during our recovery from the devastation.
We are incredibly proud of the outreach efforts made by District leadership to staff and students’ families pre and post hurricane Ian; the grace and compassion extended to staff and families managing personal recoveries while we worked swiftly to reopen schools; opportunities created for school staff to reunite and regroup and for families to rejoin their school community prior to reopening; access provided by our staff to local, state, and federal agencies providing resources for recovery; the relationships of our District leaders with others statewide who provided relief and additional hands to those working in buildings. We could not have recovered and reopened so quickly without impressive District leadership and strong community support and understanding.
While we are pleased to have students in all of our schools back into a learning environment just three weeks after the Hurricane, our recovery experience highlighted a systemic weakness that has been under review by Superintendent Bernier’s Cabinet and the Board since late spring- the District’s current enrollment system. The process of getting students back to school post-storm was made unnecessarily difficult due to our current system of school choice.
As we resume our planning for the 2022-23 school year, we will continue our reexamination of this system and school proximity plans, an initiative reintroduced to the public by Superintendent Bernier at community meetings this fall. Plans created 20 years ago for school assignment and transportation suitable for a much smaller student population are no longer sustainable.
— Cathleen O’Daniel Morgan represents District 7, an at-large district, on the Lee County School Board