Q: Can you shed any insight on the school district’s involvement with county preparations for hurricanes?
A: First, I’d like to acknowledge three of our schools that served as shelters and all of the hard work by our staff. There is always at least one SJSO deputy along with staff from Fire and Rescue at each shelter, in addition to school staff, including principals, vice principals and cafeteria managers. I’m grateful to all these teams who staffed our shelters; they had to leave their own homes and families for the benefit of those in shelter. It was a real community effort.
Q: Which schools served as shelters?
A: If the decision is made to open shelters, we have to close all the schools. We need prep time before the storm and then time to clean the shelter after the storm. In the case of Hurricane Milton, that’s why we needed three days.
Freedom Crossing Academy served as the special needs shelter. This ends up looking like a mini hospital, as people bring caregivers and equipment for their medical needs. For Hurricane Milton, we had about 18 residents at this shelter. Pedro Menendez serves as the general shelter and we had 242 people in residence. Finally, South Woods Elementary was our pet friendly shelter. It housed 86 people and 48 pets during Hurricane Milton.
We weren’t really expecting a heavy hit from the storm this time, but we do get people at our shelters from outside St. Johns County. Also, we had a lot of people impacted by flooding in Hastings and Flagler Estates that utilized the South Woods shelter.
Also of interest, the Florida National Guard requested the use of some of our buses to transport their troops to south Florida for recovery. And during Hurricane Helene, we sent a maintenance crew to Dixie County to help with cleanup. Like I said, it is a true community effort and everyone helps each other out.
Q: Will make up days be required and if so have the days been determined?
A: We know that the Florida Department of Education has said it will give no grace for these days missed. We in St. Johns County have extra minutes built into each school day that will help us. We were out five days for the two storms and will have to make up three days, but we don’t know exactly which days yet.
Q: How can our readers contact you?
A: They can email me at beverly.slough@stjohns.k12.fl.us or call me at (904) 547-7510.
