How Orange County used school resources officers to track down unaccounted for students

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Florida school districts are trying to track down thousands of students who haven’t been heard from since the coronavirus pandemic began.

When last school year went virtual due to the pandemic, there was talk about who would pay for school resource officers in Orange County with no schools in session to patrol. The solution was to use officers to try and contact the 800 students from whom no one had heard since the shutdown.

READ: Orange County cancels another high school football game due to COVID-19

The truth, they found out, was that many students didn’t have computers or internet access that would enable them to attend classes online.

So far this school year, the total number of students unaccounted for in the district is around 2,400.

The district believes many of those students may have moved due to financial issues, but they are trying to confirm that.

Orange County Public Schools reports internet restored after district wide outage Internet service was down district wide in Orange County because of a national outage. (WFTV)

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