Rapid Recovery: Florida School Districts Closed Due to Hurricane Ian Reopening October 18

Florida school districts that were forced to close due to Hurricane Ian will reopen no later than October 18, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced on Thursday.

Recovery from Hurricane Ian is continuing in DeSantis’s Florida, as the governor announced that all school districts will reopen this week, less than a month after the Category 4 storm battered the Sunshine State’s west coast.

“We fixed the bridge in Pine Island and Sanibel,” DeSantis said, walking through some of the rapid turnarounds they have seen in the west coast of the state. Access to Pine Island was established in mere days, and the Sanibel Causeway was restored this week and will be open to civilian use October 21.

Absolutely amazing to see emergency vehicles full of resources crossing the newly repaired #Sanibel Causeway today. Kudos to @GovRonDeSantis, @KevinGuthrieFL, and @FDOT_Secretary and everyone involved in making this a reality just weeks after Hurricane #Ian. pic.twitter.com/3fM3pXdCNq

— Jimmy Patronis (@JimmyPatronis) October 11, 2022

“We’re doing all that and we’ll continue to do and there’s a lot that needs to be done, and I think the bounce back and the resiliency that you’ve seen in southwest Florida has been a different level than what we’ve seen in other storms across the country, and that bodes well,” DeSantis continued, explaining that it is very difficult to return to a state of normalcy when children are not back in school.

“Obviously, that’s gotta be done safely. … There were schools that were destroyed here in Lee County, others that were damaged. We’re not going to send kids back in an unsafe environment, but I know just as a parent of young kids that them being in school is important,” he said, ultimately announcing that all school districts “will be open no later than Tuesday, October 18 in the state of Florida.”

“Most of the districts that had impacts have already opened,” he added, noting that the rapid turnaround is not something always seen in other parts of the country.

“I think in other parts of this country, if you had something of the magnitude that happened here, these kids could have been out of school for the rest of the entire semester, and that’s just the reality,” he said, reemphasizing that the state was prepared to respond to the storm, and it has been paying off.

“You build a bridge in three days because we had our agencies ready to go on that, but we also had the Department of Education ready to go to offer support in any way they can,” he added.

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This turnaround bodes well politically for the governor, as the election is roughly three weeks away. Yet, establishment media outlets salivated over the prospect of the governor botching the storm response, although that has been anything but the case.

Earlier this week, for example, DeSantis announced that there were “over 99 percent of Floridians with power, other than some of the LCEC [Lee County Electric Cooperative] pockets” after the storm left over 3 million without power.