Hurricane Ian has had a devastating impact on many aspects within communities, including the school calendar. Due to missed days, many events now have to be rearranged or postponed so that students are in school for the full 180 days required. Teachers have to overcome this challenge and rearrange their plans in order to fit the curriculum.
“I am just aggravated because I have been working really hard this year at consistency,” AP Environmental Science teacher Kelsey McEachern said. “I just keep getting roadblocks, and Ian was the icing on the cake.”
At this time, CCPS will not need to make up the six days missed due to the amount of scheduled instructional time in the first semester. Students and teachers are already adapting to these new conditions and recovering from the lost time, and many classes have not been particularly affected.
“A lot of the skills students need in English are repeated throughout the upcoming units,” English teacher Dawn Peterson said. “So, there shouldn’t be a lot of loss.”
As the end of the first quarter remained the same, teachers are taking their experience from Hurricane Irma in 2017 to decide how to handle changes from Ian. Some teachers are just pushing ahead, as seen in the English department, where they were told to not give students the end of unit exam or end of unit essays.
AP classes are significantly affected, as most are set on a very tight schedule already. Some AP teachers are planning on removing some assignments and asking students to do them independently. Some are even revising how much review time there is for the AP exams.
Math courses have also minimized review days to work as efficiently as possible. However, one thing that all these courses have in common is the confidence of their students to overcome this challenge and persevere.
“I am just going to do my best to finish the quarter with what we were working on and move forward from here,” Peterson said. “Floridians are resilient and Naples High School students have proven they are as well, from the pandemic to Ian.”
