In Their Own Words: What Lee County Teachers, Staff and Parents Are Telling Us

Teachers tell us morale is the lowest they have seen, and they are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Class sizes, special education, staffing, buildings and pay, from the people inside our schools.

By Ali Olivo · September 29, 2026

Editor's note

This fall, the district is celebrating. It earned its highest school grade point total in a decade, with 29 schools improving their letter grades and no school receiving a D or F. Those gains belong to students and teachers, and they deserve credit.

But our inbox tells a second story, about what it is costing the people in our classrooms to produce them. Here is what they told us.

Staffing

Teachers and parents describe a system stretched thin.

No teacher in the room. One teacher asked how high schoolers can meet graduation requirements “if there is no teacher in the room,” and how younger students build foundational skills when class time goes to filler worksheets.

Vacancies. An elementary school with no guidance counselor. A single person overseeing gifted services for 15 high schools. Double-digit speech-language pathologist vacancies.

Freezes and cuts. Two separate reports of a hiring freeze. One staffer says two teachers and a staff member were let go shortly after the budget was finalized. Others told us they expect more cuts in December.

We have also received multiple reports of new rounds of cuts at individual schools. At one elementary school, senders describe four teachers placed on the surplus list, three paraprofessional positions cut, and a reading coach moved back into a classroom. Some teachers tell us they plan to leave education after this year.

Those reports are hard to reconcile with new central office positions the District has posted this fall, including an Assistant Director of Procurement Services and an additional staff attorney.

We have asked the District for its current vacancy counts, whether a hiring freeze is in effect, and how many positions have been surplussed or cut at schools since the budget was adopted.

Class sizes

We have received reports from both parents and teachers, at every level, of classes larger than the constitutional caps. One teacher reports classes of 29 and 32 students. Another started the year with 20 and has heard of 24 or more elsewhere. A parent reports 21 children in a kindergarten class; a teacher reports 24 in another.

Florida's constitution, as implemented in state law, caps core classes at 18 students through third grade, 22 in grades four through eight, and 25 in grades nine through 12. State law has since changed how compliance with those caps is measured for some schools, and that is part of what teachers tried to explain to us.

How compliance is counted. One teacher said the District looks at a building-wide teacher-to-student ratio that includes staff who do not teach a class, rather than at each classroom. In that teacher's view, the District “just pays the fine” rather than hiring. We asked the District how it calculates compliance, at what level, and what penalties it has paid.

These accounts can be tested against the District's class size compliance reports, and we have requested them.

Special education

Service minutes. One teacher describes students whose IEPs require 120 minutes of service per week. Five weeks into the year, the teacher says, those students had received 120 minutes in total, because ESE teachers were pulled away for testing and other duties. The teacher added: “I'm not allowed to tell the parents that the district is not meeting legal requirements.”

Revising IEPs. An ESE teacher told us staff “can't provide all the accommodations and services in current IEPs,” and said the response has been to hold a meeting and revise the IEP. That teacher's concern is that case managers then absorb parents' anger over decisions made above them.

Parents and substitutes. A parent reports IEP violations. Other messages describe long-term substitutes in ESE classrooms who are not ESE-certified.

Certification. One ESE-certified teacher contrasted her own four-year path with a newer, much shorter route to the same certification, which she put at about 20 hours.

An IEP is a legal commitment to a child. Under federal regulation, changes after the annual IEP meeting are made either by the full IEP team at a meeting or, if the parent and the school agree, through a written amendment. Either way the parent is part of the decision. A staffing shortage is not, on its own, a basis for changing what a child is owed. We have asked the District how it tracks service minutes delivered against minutes required, and what it does when they do not match.

Buildings

Fort Myers Middle. Parents report an air conditioning failure, with 256 students signed out early. We received another message this week saying the air conditioning was out again.

Fort Myers High. A parent reports broken air conditioning and a student who became ill from the heat.

Children cannot learn in classrooms that make them sick. We have asked the District for the repair status at both schools and for its plan for aging HVAC systems.

Teachers' time

Teachers of tested math courses say they are asked to meet with the District weekly, while teachers of untested math courses are not, and that this comes on top of a weekly team meeting held during planning time. One teacher reads the union contract as allowing the District to claim only one planning period a week.

That teacher says the meetings have never been called mandatory, but the pressure is real: when the teacher did not attend right away, an administrator asked where they were. Teachers also say they were asked to come in for a half-day of planning over the summer and have not been paid for it. Another message says there is no budget for after-school tutoring.

We have asked the District whether these meetings are mandatory and how it ensures compliance with the planning-time provisions of the teachers' contract.

Teachers' pay

The messages we received about pay describe a raise of $500: about $2 a day, one supporter calculated, while insurance costs rise. The public record explains where that figure comes from, and why most employees are not getting more.

After more than six months of negotiations, the Teachers Association of Lee County and the District declared impasse on September 14. WGCU reported that the sticking point is that most TALC members are not eligible for the state-funded raise, which is worth $2,340 and goes only to full-time classroom teachers with 10 or more years of Florida public education experience. The union asked for $2,320 in locally funded increases for everyone left out, among others counselors, nurses, itinerant teachers and classroom teachers with less than 10 years in.

The $500 is the District's offer of performance pay for teachers rated effective or highly effective. The union said it would accept $300 in performance pay if every educator it represents also received a $1,000 raise. The District offered an $800 increase in starting salary; the union asked for $1,000. TALC polled its membership, and 74 percent of those who responded said not to take the deal.

TALC president Kevin Daly framed the union's position this way: the state provided money for one group of employees, and the union believes it is only fair for everyone else to receive as much. He also questioned how a district that approved $19 million in bonuses for a second year, is hiring attorneys, and runs a budget of more than $3 billion cannot find the money to cover the employees the state allocation leaves out.

One veteran teacher told us the cost of their life insurance tripled after the District stopped paying for it.

A teacher also sent documentation arguing two things: that pay for teachers with five or more years of experience has lost up to 23.5 percent against inflation, and that teacher compensation has fallen from about 41.5 percent to about 25 percent of the general fund. Those are that teacher's calculations, not ours. We are checking them against the District's own budget documents and will publish what we find either way.

Under Florida law (section 447.403, Florida Statutes), an impasse in collective bargaining goes next to a hearing before a special magistrate, who makes a recommendation. If either side rejects it, the School Board itself has the final say.

What we're asking for

Better school grades and these accounts can both be true. Families deserve the whole picture. We are asking the District to publish:

• Class size compliance by classroom, not by building
• IEP service minutes delivered compared with minutes required
• Current vacancies for teachers, ESE staff, counselors and speech-language pathologists
• Positions surplussed or cut at schools since the budget was adopted, alongside new central office positions
• The air conditioning repair and replacement plan for every school
• Plain-language cost figures for the raises and benefits on the bargaining table

If you work in or send a child to a Lee County school and are seeing something we should know about, tell us. We will not publish your identity.

Sources

• School District of Lee County, “2025-2026 School Grades Report” (July 2026)
• Florida Voice News, “Lee County schools earn highest accountability score in 10 years” (July 15, 2026)
• WGCU, “Lee teachers union and school district declare impasse” (September 18, 2026)
• Article IX, section 1, Florida Constitution, class size maximums (Florida Department of Education text)
• 34 C.F.R. § 300.324, development, review and revision of an IEP
• Section 447.403, Florida Statutes, resolution of impasse
• Section 1002.31(5), Florida Statutes, class size compliance for public schools of choice

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