On May 31, Dr. Maria Portelos-Rometo retired after a truly impactful career with UF/IFAS Extension Sarasota County.

Maria joined Sarasota County Extension in October 2007 as the Family Nutrition Program manager, after teaching family and consumer sciences and English at two school districts in Ohio. In 2008, she became the Family and Consumer Sciences Extension agent, where she built a robust and comprehensive program supporting human health and household sustainability over the next 16 years.

Maria’s Extension program covered a wide range of topics, including disaster preparedness, home food preservation, health and wellness, food safety, and strategies to prepare for and adapt to aging. In 2024 alone, she:

• Personally taught 75 classes, reaching 1,148 directly with education.
• Delivered storm readiness/disaster preparation lessons and techniques to more than 440-plus community members, through workshops across the county. This included partnering with local non-profits to distribute 175 resiliency kits — containing information, hand-crank radios, flashlights, batteries and other response items — to households facing financial challenges.
• Created a disaster-related, quick-hit video series and supporting documents, with topics including pre-storm preparations, tax-free hurricane supply shopping, post-storm best practices, post-storm food safety, and post-storm fraud avoidance.
• Delivered nutrition education and healthy lifestyle classes to adult audiences.
• Completed a nine-part “Aging Healthy” blog series as a complement to ongoing Extension classes that provide seniors with information on nutrition, exercise, and other health topics.

Between 2007 and 2014, Maria was directly responsible for overseeing the local administration of the Family Nutrition Program (FNP). That program supports nutrition education for low-resource households, including sharing vital information on how to make the healthy choice easy and affordable. In her FNP role, Maria managed up to eight nutrition educators, depending on grant resources available in a given year. And though Extension added a separate FNP manager in 2014, Maria continued to support the program through staff training and guidance.

Maria was not only a subject matter expert and experienced and respected educator, she was also a prolific writer. She created valuable educational resources, including several detailed blog series, and wrote nearly 200 blog posts in her career. She also developed dozens of fact sheets, which will continue to serve as educational resources for the community on a diverse range of topics for years to come.

Recently, Maria also worked with communications staff to develop the weekly “Around the Home” video series, which now has 25 segments on topics ranging from food safety and dishwasher care to various aspects of disaster preparedness and health considerations related to coffee, fruits, and more.

In 2023, the National Extension Association of Family and Consumer Sciences honored Maria with its “Distinguished Service Award,” in recognition of her exemplary and impactful career as a nationally distinguished Extension agent.

Her retirement is well deserved, but Maria and her valuable educational programs will be missed here at Sarasota County Extension. She brought a kind, calm, and strategic approach grounded in science and an understanding of the importance of serving local residents with empathy and understanding. Her impact will continue to be seen in this community’s improved preparedness for disasters, healthy food choices, and supports for healthy aging. As the Dean of UF/IFAS Extension Dr. Andra Johnson said in a recent newsletter, Maria was truly “a blessing to families in Sarasota County.”

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