PALM COAST — Rymfire Elementary School Assistant Principal Abra Seay was busy this week preparing for the return of hundreds of students Aug. 10 when she learned a teacher was in some Florida-style trouble.
The trouble: An alligator was under the teacher’s car. And this reptile was having none of that “see you later alligator” stuff. This reptile refused to leave.
But Seay knew the culprit. She believed his name was “Snappy” and he lived in a large retention pond on campus. She didn’t hesitate.
“I knew the teachers wanted to leave, and they had had a long day,” Seay said.
Rymfire Elementary School assistant principal knew the gator
Seay jumped into action. She grabbed a broom handle from a mop closet as she made her way out of the building, walked past the school bus drop-off and to the teachers’ parking lot.
She was right. It was Snappy. The small gator was under the teacher’s car by one of the wheels. Had the teacher not seen the gator and just backed out, there may not have been enough left of Snappy to make a good pair of leather boots.
Still, Snappy was being stubborn.
“You could tell where she had tried to throw her mail at him to try to get him to leave, and that didn’t work,” Seay said.
Seay saw the confrontation was drawing a crowd. She told people to stay back so they wouldn’t scare the gator into running in the wrong direction.
“Because I knew he wanted to get back to the water, so I just went behind him and nudged him a little bit, and then coaxed him over, you know, to the left where he could go, and then he ran off,” Seay said.
But the gator got stuck at the fence. Seay did some more nudging.
“I had to push him a little bit. And he hissed at me a couple times, but I knew he was, you know, wasn’t gonna hurt anything,” Seay said.
Soon Snappy was back in the pond.
“So, I just pushed him over to where he could go under the gate, and he slid under and went back home,” she said.
Snakes, turtles and other gators have wandered onto Rymfire Elementary’s campus
It’s not the first time Seay has had to manage some wildlife on campus.
She has had to get black racers to slither off school sidewalks before students would arrive lest they find the snakes blocking their path. The retention ponds are also home to many turtles, which sometimes crawl onto the path of cars and school buses, so Seay has had to remove them as well.
Seay also said there’s been other gators at the retention pond. But she tells the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office School Resource Deputy who in turn contacts the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission which arranges for the gators removal once they get too big.
She said she wasn’t worried about Snappy possibly taking a bite out of her.
“I knew if I just kept my distance from him, I had the pole in my hand. And you know, he’s little, and I knew he was probably more scared of me than I was of him,” she said. “So, it didn’t really bother me. I mean, I wasn’t about to go like pick him up or anything, but I knew that I could safely get him back.”
Seay graduated from the University of Central Florida and received her master’s from Nova Southeastern. But neither place provided instructions on getting rid of alligators.
A video posted under Seay’s Facebook account has the caption: “When a visitor doesn’t sign in at the front office, he must be escorted off campus.”
“I knew it needed to be done, and so I wanted to make sure that my teachers could go home. And it was a long day, and I was just trying to keep everybody safe,” with the hashtag “other duties as assigned.”
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: ‘Snappy,’ Rymfire’s resident gator, pays a visit before school starts
Reporting by Frank Fernandez, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Frank Fernandez, Daytona Beach News-Journal | USA TODAY Network
