TAMPA, Fla. — Hillsborough County teachers returned to school on Wednesday to prepare for students to return on Thursday, after being closed for a week and a half due to Hurricane Milton.  

Schools were used as emergency shelters for families in Hillsborough County, and getting them ready was quite the undertaking.

Sickles High School was one of the schools used as an emergency shelter. The principal says they expected 700-800 people to shelter there, but they ended up with more than 1400 people, which is a record for the school.

“We had to pile up all the tables and chairs in order to create space for 40 people to be safe from a storm, so I’m really proud to be part of that,” said Lisa Gaspar, an ESE teacher at Sickles High School.

Before Hurricane Milton, Gaspar cleared out her entire classroom so it could be used as a shelter, and this week, she put it all back together.

“Today, we’re coming in. It’s a planning day, and the whole point is to reset the room,” she said.

Locals in the shelter called the classrooms home for two nights, including the 120 pets people brought with them.

The school’s principal says aside from putting their classrooms back together, teachers are also working on new lesson plans.

“A lot of our teachers are very strict as far as their curriculum and knowing what teachers have to cover by certain dates, I know they’re planning on how to catch our students back up to be successful on exams,” said Sickles High School principal Krista Luloff.

Superintendent Van Ayres says they’re working through how to make up the missed time, and have several options. He says after seeing how the community came together to get schools cleaned up so quickly after Hurricane Milton, he’s confident they’ll all get through this, too, together.

“We have this mantra, ‘Hillsborough strong, stronger together,’ and when you see the community come together and help us, we couldn’t have gotten to this point for tomorrow to be open without the help of the entire community, our school staff, so it’s really been great to see,” Ayres said.

As Gaspar puts the final touches on her classroom, she says tomorrow, she and her students will focus on the future.

“I think normalcy, and getting them back to their routine, is most helpful for students so the students in this classroom have significant disabilities, and so that routine and that normalcy, that’s going to be the most key component,” she said.

Ayres says at one point, 170 schools were without power, and he’s been in constant contact with TECO, and TECO told him they should have power restored to every school by Thursday morning.