A young alligator tried to exercise his right to school choice at Rymfire Elementary School in Palm Coast Tuesday afternoon, but was found to be lacking the necessary credentials.
It was also unclear whether the gator was already a recipient of the state’s tax-supported vouchers, and may have been attempting to double-dip–or triple-dip, as the case may be: there are three retention ponds at Rymfire Elementary. The state does not accurately keep track of voucher recipients.
The Flagler County school district has been desperate for students. But by law they have to be at least warm-bodied. Alligators are cold-blooded.
“We do take all students, but they have to be human,” Superintendent LaShakia Moore said, “so this gator is going to have to find another place to enroll. He didn’t have a nametag on, so I wasn’t able to cross-reference him with our voucher list to see if he is receiving any funding.” Moore, who was responding to a reporter’s questions by text, punctuated her statement with laughing-to-tears emoji.
Faculty had been going through daily training in preparation for the new school year, which begins Monday (Aug. 10).
“We were finishing up a staff meeting and Mr. Lee, our principal, got a phone call from one of our teachers that there was an alligator under her car and she couldn’t leave,” Assistant Principal Abra Seay said. “It’s not uncommon for them to be in our retention pond. We usually have to call to have them removed.”
When they’re little though, Seay, who grew up in Flagler County and is neither unfamiliar with nor afraid of its wildlife, there’s no need to call in the troops. “I just went out, I thought to myself I’ll pass the janitor closet, I’ll get the broomstick and I’ll head on out there because I knew he just wanted to get back to the water.”
Seay was familiar with “that little guy,” though they’re not on a first-name basis, and at one point, the gator twice hissed at the assistant principal. He was not disciplined. It had been a long day, the teacher just wanted to leave–and would have run over the little creature had she not noticed him–so Seay inched him toward a gate opening at one of the school’s three ponds, and he crawled through. The teacher took a partial video of the encounter.
Seay has been with the district for 27 years, half of those years as an administrator. “Seeing a gator is not abnormal. It’s part of living in Florida,” she said, recalling how she previously chased a black racer snake off the Rymfire sidewalk in the morning before students arrived, how turtles crawling out of the ponds have held up the car riders’ line, how at Flagler Palm Coast High School, where she’d previously been an assistant principal, an opossum had to be removed from the courtyard. “It sort of comes with the territory, you want to make sure your campus is safe at all times for your students and your staff,” Seay said.
Moore, in a more serious tone, took the occasion to talk about the school year ahead.
“We are anticipating a great school year,” Moore said. “We just wrapped up professional learning with our teachers and paraprofessionals yesterday. We have professional learning for our food service and transportation department today, and so we are anticipating a great year.”
There are fewer than 10 instructional vacancies district-wide. “We know that the funding is getting more and more difficult for us to continue to operate at the standard that we have operated, but we’re doing our best to ensure that we are not lowering the level of service that we’re providing to our students,” Moore said. Budget conversations and meetings are now routine to keep the budget balanced, at times requiring cuts.
“We’re making those cuts as far away from our classrooms as possible, so that has been our focus,” Moore said. “We definitely need to make sure we are being mindful of our funding source so that we can continue to provide a high-quality service to our students.”
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