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Some of them have newborn babies. At least one of them has a broken toe. All of them are coming off the end of a two-month break.

But despite their myriad personal situations, most of Lee County’s nearly 5,000 teachers are more concerned with decorating, data-crunching, adapting to a new work environment and preparing for the more than 100,000 students they will be responsible for come Monday -- unless Tropical Storm Fay delays that.

Fifth-year teacher Jen Seluk, for example, had triplets six months ago. As an Estero High School intensive reading instructor, she has the weight of the school’s letter grade pressing down on her shoulders. She will have more than 100 students this year. She has two dogs at home. And, oh yeah, the 27-year-old is also the swimming coach.

“It’s just balancing everything. There’s a lot to do at school that I don’t think a lot of people realize for us,” Seluk said in her classroom Thursday. “So, taking care of this, taking care of that, it will all come together. It has to.”

It seems in every classroom, the teachers aren’t backing down.

At Three Oaks Elementary School in south Lee County, Amanda Nagle, 24, is starting her first year of raising students. Statistically, she is more likely than not to give up the profession in three years.

For 180 days, Nagle will be responsible for a class of nearly 20 third-graders. But she has help from other teachers in her grade level and she was lucky enough to do her student teaching at Three Oaks last year. It’s like she was born for this, Nagle said one week before her little desks fill up.

“I wanted to be a teacher since I was little. I played teacher in my basement with my little sister,” Nagle said. “So, I don’t see myself doing anything else.”

She took home worksheets from her classes when she was little and would administer them to her sister.

Nagle said she loves school and isn’t nervous about much. At the start of last week, though, she did run into some trouble: hooking up the classroom computer system. It was imperative the technology be operating when parents visited for open house.

It might seem like setting up a classroom is a simple process. But as teachers point out, even the stuff on the walls can have a significant impact on the area’s future workforce.

“Most students, in general, are very visual. So, when they can see the picture, they can see the diagram, they can see the illustration, you know, on the board, on the screen, they tend to receive it a lot more with open arms as opposed to just reading a textbook,” said Robert Dandakar, 41, who teaches a combined physics and chemistry class to eighth-graders at Bonita Springs Middle School.

It’s his first year at Bonita Middle, so Dandakar spent four hours setting up a display board outside his classroom last week. It’s a 10-foot by 5-foot collage of various illustrations, images and diagrams, among them the periodic table of the elements.

“At least if they’re looking at the board, they’re also learning,” Dandakar said. “If I can get another 30 seconds ... that’s 30 more seconds that I had out of the day teaching the students.”

But sometimes it’s a lack of decorating that helps students learn.

Dena Ewing, 25, who teaches ceramics at Estero High, said decorating plays a large part in teaching students the importance of delivering and accepting good feedback. She is leaving her walls relatively blank, especially the back wall of her classroom where students’ work will be reviewed.

“I want them to feel comfortable, and starting off with a clean slate usually gives you that impression,” Ewing said. “That’s going to be the critique wall. In art, you have to be comfortable giving critiques and getting critiques and I believe that’s one social skill they really need to learn as far as high school is concerned. So, that is going to be their wall to display anything they want, say whatever they want.”

Imagine decorating a classroom for the last time, after 40 years of bringing up future professionals. That was the position 65-year-old third-grade teacher Joan Falbey found herself in this year, which she intended to be her last.

She thought 40 years would be a nice, round number to finish the career she loves, and the fact she broke her big toe a few weeks ago didn’t help her final return from summer.

“When I came into the classroom this year for the first day it was empty. I walked through the door and got tears in my eyes and thought this is my life, how am I going to be able to walk away,” said Falbey, who teaches at Three Oaks. “So, I might teach another year.”

When she was young, Falbey said she would never teach. Now, she is passing on her wisdom to younger teachers, like Nagle, who teaches in a nearby classroom. Seated next to Nagle, Falbey said the first day of class can have a significant impact on the rest of the year.

“It’s extremely important,” Falbey said. “Just letting the children know that they are safe, that it is going to be an inspiring year, that they will learn many exciting things and that they can trust you.”

But what if the students don’t speak English well, are way behind or have a disability?

Mane Lafalaise, 29, will teach English to speakers of other languages at Bonita Middle this year, as he has been doing for six years. The multilingual educator said the school is his second home.

“You have to establish a connection with those students. You have to get to know them, their environment, where they came from,” Lafalaise said, adding that parental involvement is his biggest challenge.

Katrina Gunnels, 38, will call Bonita Middle her home for the first time this year. Earlier in her nine-year career, Gunnels taught in the prison system, at juvenile justice programs, taught regular education and other students similar to the ones she will have this year.

Gunnels will have students of middle school age who are performing on levels anywhere from first grade to seventh grade. Some of them will have physical or mental disabilities, others have had a tough road that led to difficulties in keeping up in school.

Unlike most other teachers, Gunnels is at a loss on how to plan for the year. She said it’s like teaching everything all at once.

“You can’t just blanket a lesson for everybody, because you have students that are learning first-grade math, you have students that are learning third-grade math,” Gunnels said. “It’s pretty hard to pre-lesson plan, because you don’t know what skills your students are going to walk in with.”

It’s a tough situation to walk into after spending a summer of excess time. Gunnels said the adjustment back to the classroom is a gradual one that begins before teachers even walk into the school building.

“Summer’s interesting. It usually takes about two weeks once school gets out to de-escalate and every teacher I know starts school really the beginning of August, because once August hits, you start running things through your head,” Gunnels said. “The ‘wahoo!’ effect is in effect for most of the month of July.”

And the week before school starts, everyone is in line. Like an army, the teachers march back to school. They haul cases of textbooks to their classrooms. They attend training sessions. They review the test scores from last year and begin looking forward on their next class.

The summer is over, but, thankfully, the school year has begun. Unlike the vast, complex intricacies of the teaching pool in Lee County, the school year is consistent, and many look forward to it.

“This is going to be a great year,” Lafalaise said as he moved dozens of textbooks into place. “I can feel it. We’re going to be an ‘A’ school.”