SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — Monday marked the first day back to school for Sarasota County after everything shut down this spring due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ve been working hard to get ready for this, and I think it went rather smoothly,” said School Board Member Shirley Brown.
Brown was joined by the new Sarasota County Superintendent of Schools outside of Brentwood Elementary School to tell us how the first day was going.
“Any first day of school is exciting, but in the 32 years that I’ve been in education, this is definitely an unusual start to a school year,” Superintendent Brennen Asplen said.
Students and teachers were required to wear face masks while on campus.
“What I witnessed here at Brentwood Elementary was absolutely amazing,” Asplen said. “The beginning of the day seems to flow very very well, especially for a first day.”
Many parents say drop off was more backed up than usual this morning, likely due to new safety protocols.
Manatee County schools experienced this as well. The only difference is they were taking student’s temperatures, while Sarasota County Schools are not.
“I did stop in a couple of classrooms to see teachers organizing their remote learning and their face-to-face learning instructional platform, and they seemed to be doing a fantastic job with that,” Asplen said.
But it wasn’t without some growing pains. Many classrooms had half their students in the class and the other half online.
That was the case for Petra Ratner’s sons Alfie and Felix. They are both learning from home this school year. Felix is in 5th grade at Pine View.
“First day is going pretty good, I think,” Felix said. “I think it will end up being a pretty nice school year.”
He must be online at 9:15 a.m. sharp for attendance.
“We started by just getting on zoom and then just waiting for everybody else to get on,” Felix said. “Then once everyone gets on then our teacher just starts explaining how school is going to go and how it’s all going to work.”
Felix says there were some challenges during class today.
“She [his teacher] had a couple of technical difficulties trying to get us on the screen, as well as the documents and have everyone see us and hear us well,” Felix said.
There were minor bumps in the road, but he’s hoping it will only get better with time.
For Petra Ratner’s other son Alfie, who is in Kindergarten at Lakeview Elementary School, she says the teacher had a lot more technical issues.
“You have seven children in a class and you have seven online and she’s talking to the class and the computer is somewhere else, so we don’t hear her and we don’t see her either, so the microphone kept going in and out,” Ratner said.
Ratner said she sat with her son Alfie the entire class.
“Because otherwise he would have no idea what the teacher’s even saying, Ratner said. “We couldn’t hear her. We only heard her once in a while.”
Not only were there technical issues, but Ratner says the school day was shortened. On a regular school day, her kindergarten would be in class from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. That wasn’t the case today.
“We got one hour today, one hour of the zoom time,” Ratner said. “And of course I had to sit there throughout the whole time and we maybe heard, I don’t know, 10 sentences all together. It was tough.”
Ratner says she understand that it’s only the first day of school in a pandemic and plans to be patient while her son’s school works out the kinks in their technology.
“There’s a lot of questions, a lot of improvements that could happen but again it’s the first day, so we are going to get through this and hopefully learn and make it better for all of us,” Ratner said.
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