Broward teachers prepare their classrooms and emotions for the first day of school

If there’s a classroom designed like a courtroom, there’s bound to be a gavel, and a teacher ready to pound it — and Daniel Katz is that teacher.

“Order in the court, we are ready for the first day of school?!” Katz said after pounding the gavel in his room at Fort Lauderdale High School Monday.

Katz gave up a law practice to teach high school law and drama two decades ago and never looked back. His motivation, as you can guess, is more than money.

“We get to a point as an adult where it’s been there, done that, but these kids haven’t, and when they are exposed to the beautiful things this world has to offer for them and how they can discover things about themselves to make great decisions for their own families and themselves as they move forward, it’s amazing,” Katz said.

Duck into any classroom these days at Fort Lauderdale High School, and you will find teachers preparing their classrooms for the deluge of students next week. We saw Byron Montenegro scrubbing desktops and putting up decorations, making his marine biology classroom as stimulating as possible for his students.

Veteran physiology teacher Nori Suarez looks forward to opening day every year.

“I concentrate on the excitement, you know how exciting it is to start a new year? You tell me a profession that there is, that every 10 months, that you can absolutely start again, start fresh, tweak it, do it a little bit better, reflect, I get to do that,” Suarez said.

Across town at Virginia Shuman Young Elementary School, Erica Leonhardt is excited to welcome back her fourth and fifth graders, and also has concerns about new state laws. Her school is in a neighborhood that has a large LGBTQ population, so the extension this year of the Parental Rights in Education Law — known as the so-called Don’t Say Gay law — from third grade all the way through high school could impact her directly.

“I feel a little bit of pressure not to broach it and a little unsure if I’m approached by it, what is the right thing to say?” Leonhardt said when I asked her what she’s allowed to say if questions come up about some of the kids in her class having two mommies or two dads. “I wish I didn’t have that pressure going into this year.”

Leonhardt said many of her colleagues have the same concerns, but she and other teachers we spoke to said they will concentrate on teaching the curriculum and using their experience to make sure every child feels welcome and comfortable in their classrooms.

“I am always gonna put my students first, whatever is the best for them, I gonna follow the rules, but the best for my students, so they don’t feel strange in the school, don’t feel strange in my class,” said Byron Montenegro at Fort Lauderdale High.