The nation's fourth largest school district will be back in session Wednesday as Miami-Dade County holds its first day of classes for the 2022-23 school year.
It will be the inaugural 'first day' for Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Jose Dotres, who assumed the position at the end of last school year following the resignation of Alberto Carvalho.
“When you walk this building, all you saw were students that were excited, interacting with each other in very friendly ways, the seniors with their crowns, so that’s the type of feeling that you want to have in a school," he said during a stop at Hialeah Gardens High School. "The experience of working together for the first time in a year that we hope provides a lot of continuity and no disruptions to teaching, learning, and even friendships, we have to make sure we connect with each other.”
In a one-on-one interview conducted at Brownsville Middle School, Dotres told NBC 6's Ari Odzer with a laugh that he’s a nervous wreck and simultaneously excited to have a return to normalcy at school, with teachers and students connecting in person again.
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“So the biggest priority right now continues to be where we left off, which is making sure that we are able to accelerate learning versus remediate,” Dotres said.
In other words, getting kids academically where they need to be after two years of learning regression, especially the youngest children.
“It becomes critical that we’re able to support them even more than in the past because many of them have not had a regular school year, so it is about intervention, it is about tutorials,” the superintendent explained.
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Dotres says the district is keenly aware that teachers might feel like they’re under a microscope, now that two state laws have taken effect that restricts what they can discuss about race, history, and LGBTQ issues.
“We are all in this together, teachers should not feel this incredible pressure that they are at it by themselves, you have an entire network of support via the principal, via the school site and the district that we’re trying to attend to these issues if they even arise,” Dotres said.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools still has a teacher shortage, with more than 200 teacher vacancies as the school year starts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says the military can help. DeSantis announces a program to let veterans who don’t have college degrees become teachers.
“We need the most qualified individuals with our students, and so we’re going to make sure that if we have military personnel under these new provisions that they are able to deliver instruction, that we prepare them well, and more importantly, that we coach them in areas that they need,” Dotres replied.
Dotres says so far, the district has not hired any military veterans under the governor’s initiative, but MDCPS routinely hires people who have college degrees in fields other than education and then trains them to become teachers. Dotres himself was one of those career-change hires decades ago.
Both Miami-Dade and Broward County public schools will serve students lunch and breakfast free of charge for the 2022-23 school year.
The free lunch is an amendment to the school board's policy for serving meals to students under the National School Lunch / School Breakfast Program, the Miami-Dade Schools district said in a news release Monday. For additional information, contact the Department of Food and Nutrition.
Miami-Dade is the final South Florida county to begin classes. Both Monroe and Palm Beach County held their first days last Wednesday while Broward County held its first day on Tuesday.
