Laura Kingsley should be somewhere in the Polynesian Islands right now.
Two years ago, the Sarasota County School District chief academic officer and assistant superintendent had been planning the iconic cruise she and her husband would take to celebrate her retirement, originally planned for the summer of 2020.
The around-the-world trip would be a fitting end to a four-decade career in education, and Kingsley had assembled a three-inch thick binder of research on all the places she would visit.
But in November of 2019, former Superintendent Todd Bowden resigned, district leadership was in turmoil, and, in March, COVID-19 shut schools down for months. Kingsley knew she could not leave in the midst of such chaos, so she pushed it back a year.