California Gov. Gavin Newsom decisively beat back a recall effort Tuesday, as almost two-thirds of voters chose to keep him in office for the remainder of his first term.

While mail-in votes await to be counted, the race was called for the no votes. Republican Larry Elder, the frontrunner to replace Newsom if a majority of voters had cast ballots for removing him, received 47 percent.

In mid-summer, opposition to Newsom’s pandemic restrictions on schools and businesses appeared to be strong enough for the recall to succeed, but a push to fend off the effort intensified in recent weeks with support from Washington. On Monday, President Joe Biden campaigned for Newsom in Long Beach, calling Elder “the closest thing to a Trump clone that I’ve ever seen in your state.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sometimes been on the opposing side of the state’s large charter community, signing legislation that added roadblocks to launching and expanding schools.

But that doesn’t mean charter leaders are ready to vote him out. Margaret Fortune, who leads a network of schools serving mostly Black students, called the Sept. 14 recall disruptive.

“This moment, when we are in the midst of a pandemic that just won’t quit and when parts of the state are on fire, is not the right time to create chaos in state government,” Fortune said.

Launched by a former sheriff’s office sergeant , the recall effort picked up steam after Newsom attended a large, not-socially distanced dinner with lobbyists at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant in November despite the states’ restrictions on . But since then, he has signed a state budget that includes of funding for schools and earned the teachers unions’ support for a statewide COVID-19 for school employees. Even so, over 40 challengers — a slate that includes a conservative radio talk show host, Olympian and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, and a wealthy businessman who lost to Newsom in 2018 — qualified as replacement candidates.

Their success could rest a lot on attitudes about education — on issues from reopening to mask mandates and new quarantine rules enacted in response to new outbreaks.

The ballot asks two questions: Should voters remove Newsom from office, and if so, who should take his place? Democrats on the list argue that the party needs a backup plan if the recall is successful. It wasn’t clear until July that Newsom could be vulnerable, but in recent days his chances of remaining in office have improved.

The show the campaign to keep Newsom leading over the campaign to remove him by a margin of 8 percentage points. Among the candidates running to replace him, conservative talk show host Larry Elder is out in front with 24 percent of the vote, followed by Democrat , a 29-year-old real estate developer and YouTuber, with 10 percent.

Under the rules, a candidate with as little as 20 percent of the vote could become governor if more than half of voters choose yes on the recall.

Some experts believe aspects of Newsom’s education agenda hold wide appeal for voters.

Bruce Fuller, a sociology and education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, cites new preschool slots and an increase in that puts the state above the national average among the “huge wins for California’s children and families” under Newsom.

“None of the governor’s 46 challengers have put forward clear plans for buoying middle-class families or lifting our schools,” he said. “Dashing Newsom’s policy progress would only hurt the state’s families and future prospects for their children.”

‘Fighting for our kids’

Supporters of the recall, however, argue that the state’s slow pace toward reopening schools in the spring and a rocky back-to-school season this fall will be on many voters’ minds — “especially parents who are frustrated by how district and union leaders have responded to the pandemic,” said Aaron Garth Smith, the director of education policy at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

Emily Diaz, a San Diego parent, is among those who say the pace of reopening has influenced her opinions as a voter.

“It has shifted how I view the world and where I thought the good guys were,” she said. “I do have a hunch that there are a lot of parents that really had our eyes opened when we were fighting for our kids to go back to school.”

Reopen California Schools, a statewide organization, is backing state Assemblyman and education committee Vice-Chair , a former high school English teacher in Los Angeles whose mother was a special education teacher. In March, he voted against Newsom’s , saying it didn’t go far enough.

“We’ve seen Kiley fight for us,” said Jonathan Zachreson, who founded the reopening group. “When I realized the teachers unions were influencing the governor, that’s when I said, ‘We need to support the recall.’”

The California Teachers Association endorsed Newsom when he ran in 2018, contributing over $1 million toward his campaign, and they’re strongly opposed to the recall. While the governor could have local union contracts to force schools to reopen, he didn’t, leaving districts to negotiate with their unions when students could return.

Kiley said he thinks the fact that many students missed a year of in-person learning is a huge factor in the election, as well as what he called “onerous” reopening policies, such as universal masking and “excessive quarantining of healthy kids.” In the , 6,500 students missed one or more days during the first week of school because they either tested positive for COVID-19 or came in contact with someone who did. Several other districts across the state are sending students home because of as well.

“We need to get our schools functioning in a normal way again,” Kiley said. “We need to bring some sanity to it all.”

Another chaotic return to classrooms could draw more attention to private school choice — a policy that has never gained traction in California. There are currently two efforts to put an education savings account initiative on the November 2022 ballot. Kiley proposed a for families’ to fund at-home learning costs with private donations, but it didn’t go anywhere.

shows a loss of 160,000 students in public schools last year, with many leaving for charters and homeschooling. “Policymakers haven’t given families any options,” Smith said, “while states such as West Virginia, Arizona, and Florida have worked to make education dollars more flexible.”

and — who voiced admiration for former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during a recent rally — are also among those who say they would expand school choice if elected.

During two debates so far, which Elder skipped, the other Republican front runners pledged to reverse Newsom’s statewide mask mandate in schools, saying they would allow local districts to decide.

‘Following the process’

The chance that Elder or any other candidate with less than a quarter of the vote could become the next governor of a state with the fifth largest economy in the world prompted in federal court last month. The plaintiffs argue the recall election is unconstitutional because even if 49 percent of voters choose to keep Newsom in office, the victory would go to a candidate with a much smaller number of supporters. They want Newsom’s name added to the list of possible replacements or a new recall procedure.

But voters have already received ballots in the mail, and those in favor of the recall are “just following the process,” said Fortune.

It’s one she’s been through before.

Fortune served as education adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis when voters recalled him in 2003 and chose actor Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. The difference between then and now, she said, is that Schwarzenegger assembled a high-profile that included both Democrats and Republicans with past government experience.

She doesn’t have confidence that any of Newsom’s challengers could “stand up a government.”

Another contrast to 2003 is that a higher percentage of voters chose Schwarzenegger than chose to keep Davis in office — 49 to 45 percent.

“There’s virtually no chance of that happening this time,” said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, an advocacy organization, and a former Democratic state assemblymember. He added that the recall hasn’t been like a normal gubernatorial election where there would be a “robust discussion about education.”

Whether Newsom can prevail largely depends on turnout, Fortune said.

“There’s an enthusiasm gap, where Republicans are more energized than Democrats,” she said, but agreed with Lempert that those who want to challenge Newsom’s record on education can wait until next year when he’s up for reelection. “That’s what November ‘22 is for. It’s right around the corner.”

But other than some paper assignments, which DeHerrera plans to spread out over the next several days, she wasn’t given any guidance to keep her daughter on track.

“There was zero planning in how students are being educated when they are being sent home,” she said. “They haven’t offered any virtual learning, even though the teacher has no children for a whole week.”

A limiting students to 40 hours of remote instruction for the entire school year — an effort to strongly nudge everyone back to the classroom — is one reason. Many districts around the country are finding themselves similarly caught off-guard. Some chalk it up to an overcorrection on the part of states and districts, under pressure from parents and the Biden administration to get students back in school after previous botched attempts. But the Delta variant has spoiled best-laid plans for a full return. Some districts are struggling to shift back to remote learning and others are leaving families hanging over how their children will stay on track.

“I really can’t believe our schools are as unprepared for remote learning as they seem to be,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “It’s been clear for months that remote options would be necessary, at least as long as kids remain unvaccinated. Everyone had their heads in the sand, and kids will pay the price.”

The Center’s of districts’ reopening plans shows that 38 out of 100 provide information on how they’ll continue learning for quarantined students, and of those, 16 say they will provide instruction or support.

‘Now they’ve overcorrected’

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in July that required parents who wanted their children to remain in remote learning to sign up for a program called Independent Study.

That’s caused confusion across the state over whether teachers can still hold Zoom classes with their quarantined students. The principal at Overland Elementary in Los Angeles was among those unclear on the rules, telling parents that the law prohibited teachers from providing live instruction.

That left Alexis Rochlin’s first grader Henry — one of 20 students in a single class quarantined for six days at Overland — with no more than an hour of schoolwork. And with family gatherings for Labor Day and the Jewish holidays approaching, she’s expecting more quarantine periods in the future.

The Los Angeles district announced this week in which teachers can use Zoom if an entire class is out or livestream their lessons if just a few students are out.

But that was after Kathy Meza’s fourth-grader Matthew missed seven days of learning. He was quarantined on the first day of school, Aug. 16, and she said she never received any communication from teachers.

“He was not getting any homework. He was basically home doing nothing,” said Meza. He was like, ‘When I go back to school, everything will be new for me.’”

Even though Los Angeles leaders responded to concerns from parents, others in the state are still waiting for answers. When Bobbie Lambert’s daughter Krystal, a student in the San Juan Unified School District, near Sacramento, was quarantined, her junior ROTC teacher was the only one to upload any assignments onto Google Classroom.

Jenny Hontz, spokeswoman for advocacy group Speak Up, said she doesn’t expect the legislature or Newsom, who is facing a Sept. 14 recall, to make any changes regarding remote learning until after the vote.

“The governor doesn’t want to do anything that looks like we’re going back to Zoom school, but that’s standing in the way of common sense,” she said. The state has been criticized for delaying school reopening in the spring, and “now they’ve overcorrected,” she said. The California Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Echoing complaints about uneven access to remote learning last year, some observers say students in Los Angeles’s — where case rates are higher and vaccination rates are lower — will likely miss more school because they’ll have to quarantine more often.

“It’s going to be such an equity issue,” said Hannah Gravette, regional vice president in Los Angeles for Innovate Public Schools. “There needs to be some other access to classrooms, even if you’re just watching what the teacher is doing.”

One complication in many districts, however, is that the laptops students were assigned last year have now been returned to school. That’s the case in the Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, where nearly 10,000 students are in quarantine. The district last week approved a $2.6 million contract with an online that students can access around the clock.

But there’s a hitch: In many ways, schools in the Tampa area are facing the same remote learning challenges they did when schools first closed in 2020. Some don’t have internet access. Others only connect on their phones, and some parents can’t pick up paper copies of lessons at school because they’ve tested positive for COVID-19. Even if a student has a computer, teachers aren’t required to teach over Zoom due to an agreement with the local teacher’s union, said spokeswoman Erin Maloney.

“Kids are required to keep in contact with their teachers,” she said. “But we try to be reasonable because every student’s situation is different.”

In Georgia, several metro Atlanta schools have already transitioned to or added hybrid options because of outbreaks. The Cobb County School District, where have been protesting leaders’ decision to keep masks optional, initially turned down requests to reopen registration for its virtual academy.

This month, leaders announced they will reopen the later this fall if families want remote learning during the second semester. But that doesn’t address the interruption in learning for students in quarantine.

“There was pretty much nothing offered to us — no Zoom, no live option at all,” said Meredith Copley, whose children, ages 10 and 12, were quarantined last week.

She had to work, so she told her son how many chapters to read each day and gave him a math worksheet.

A few states, such as and , are now considering policies that would bring back remote options.

Some lawmakers want to limit virtual options to higher-achieving students. The legislature is advancing a bill that would cut off state funding for students learning remotely if they scored low on state exams last year or were chronically absent.

Joseph South, chief learning officer at the International Society for Technology in Education, said it’s “counterproductive” for leaders to eliminate options that technology has already made possible.

It’s a political climate where it’s hard for schools to catch a break. Just three months ago, they were under fire for taking too long to reopen. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said he was “all schools will offer full-time in person learning to every student this fall.” Assessments show some students are months off track academically — with remote learning getting the lion’s share of the blame.

But the tricky politics of the pandemic seem unlikely to change soon.

Looking several months ahead, Vikki Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University in New Jersey, expects to see “a checkerboard where the politics of where you live will determine the vaccination rates for younger kids.” Once vaccines are available for students in the elementary grades, quarantines will recede in some communities and persist in others, she said. She doesn’t expect vaccine mandates for students until 2022-23.

That’s why this year, she said, policymakers and district leaders should “use a scalpel and not a hammer” in determining remote learning policies.

Katz advocates for districts to hire college-age to serve as a “link between families and schools when they need it badly.” But she added, “large bureaucracies move slowly and viruses move quickly.”

At some campuses, it’s the end of a long silence, with students eager to socialize, reconnect with teachers and resume in-person learning.  

Scanning photos from the past month, between the familiar sights of dropoffs, new backpacks and community reunions were jarring reminders that this new school year is far from normal. First-day photos revealed vaccination events, chaotic health screenings, emotional send-offs, doctors at “meet and greets” and protesters convening close to campuses. Parents posted back to school photos, but captions were often tinged with concern. One parent’s update how her son bonded with a peer over nervous parents — that he found someone “who also has an overprotective mom who cares about Covid.”

Below, some of the more memorable photos we found, of what it’s like to return to school in the fall of 2021:

Lead Image: Orange County Register / Getty Images

The Biden administration Thursday stepped up efforts to get more students vaccinated as the school year begins, with the National PTA, pediatricians and sports organizations to reach reluctant families.

The effort includes incorporating vaccines into physical exams for school athletes, featuring pediatricians at back-to-school events and supplying schools with resources to host pop-up vaccine clinics, including sample text messages and letters. Saturday will kick off a “week of action” devoted to promoting the vaccine, with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visiting a vaccine clinic in Topeka, Kansas, along with training sessions for parents, teachers and student organizations on how to promote vaccines.

“I remember last year. We were reopening schools and we didn’t have the science. We didn’t have the experience. We didn’t have the lessons learned,” Cardona said Wednesday in remarks after visiting a summer enrichment program at Graceland Park-O’Donnell Heights Elementary Middle School in Baltimore. “If you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet, do it now. This is our number one line of defense.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

On Thursday, Cardona  that he’ll also be monitoring how “politics are getting in the way” and whether some families aren’t sending their children to school because they feel it’s not safe without mask requirements.  “To me those are adult actions preventing students to their right of public education.”

That message comes as less than 40 percent of the nation’s 12- to 15-year-olds have been vaccinated, . And the rate among 16- and 17-year-olds is less than half. Vaccination rates are higher among white children than Black children. The administration, however, is not only facing resistance from some parents toward the vaccine, but is also seeing growing backlash against mask mandates, with some districts at odds with governors over the issue.

The dissent was clear last week during a virtual town hall for parents where Aaliyah Samuel, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted to answer parents’ questions about the vaccine.

Participants began flooding the chat field with critical comments about the vaccine, remote learning and masks. Others shot back with links to studies on vaccine and mask effectiveness.

In all caps, one person wrote: “Hesitancy comes from the lies and lack of information. Those that have been vaccinated are the ones that are getting infected yet again, creating new variants such as Delta strain.”

Another responded: “Trump paid for the vaccine and took it.”

Samuel eventually jumped in and shut down the chat function.

“This is not a place for negative comments to attack individuals. It is a place to share information,” she said. “And if you don’t believe in the information, that’s your choice, but we’re sharing the best of the information that we have.”

Thursday’s White House announcement didn’t mention the role of the teachers unions in getting more students vaccinated. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has been on her own this week to encourage parents to send their children to school this fall, while also advocating for a universal mask mandate.

In comments on SiriusXM POTUS’s “Laura Coates Show” this week, Weingarten called vaccines “the big game changer.” While restating her position that vaccine issues should be negotiated with local affiliates, she said on  that she is now more open to mandates for teachers.

“We want to persuade the holdouts,” she said. “But we’re looking at all the alternatives.”

Parents and community members know Kimberly Robel, principal of San Bernardino’s North Verdemont Elementary School, as an unshakably enthusiastic leader. The administrator gives off “a cheerleader energy because she’s just so gung-ho, rah-rah,” said district spokesperson Maria Garcia.

But last week, Robel was anxious.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

She was planning for her school’s Aug. 2 reopening, when the full 516-student body would return in person to classrooms. For the entirety of the past school year, the 47,000-student San Bernardino City Unified School District had remained fully virtual with no face-to-face instruction. Aside from a cohort of young people who participated in a three-week summer program at Robel’s elementary school in July, none of her learners had stepped foot inside the building since March 2020.

Fears replayed in her head like a song she couldn’t quite get out.

“We worry about our kids getting sick, worry about adults getting sick,” Robel told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, wondering, “Is the Delta variant going to devastate us again? Are we going to have to shut down again?”

Yet come Monday, the school was again filled with the long-awaited buzz of students, and to the great relief of many, the day went off without a hitch, according to Garcia. Across the district, some and North Verdemont reported no COVID cases.

“It’s something that we have missed so much,” said Robel. “The little faces and eyes smiling over the mask 
 it just makes your heart kind of explode.”

After a summer that brought renewed pandemic worries amid a surge in Delta variant infections, and with children under 12 not yet eligible for coronavirus vaccines, the return to full-time, in-person learning that appeared all but inevitable this spring as schools embraced reopening is now shadowed by doubt.

Hallways across the country are beginning to once again echo with excited conversations and the squeak of new sneakers. Among the first to go back are districts like San Bernardino and some others that took a conservative approach to COVID mitigation by remaining fully remote or hybrid last year. Their first-out-of-the-gate experiences may prove a bellwether for what’s to come this fall.

“They’re the ones to watch whether they open traditional (in person, five days a week), because they haven’t been traditional in over a year,” Dennis Roche, who has tracked school reopenings through the pandemic as co-founder of the website Burbio, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Schools that reopened fully last spring, “they’ve already rode this train,” Robel admits. But as her district marches forward with the return to classrooms, the principal is confident that they will rise to any challenges that may unfold.

“The people here are resilient,” she said of her community, which weathered a mass terrorist shooting in 2015 that claimed the lives of 14 individuals and seriously injured another 22.

Clayton County Public Schools, a suburban district just south of downtown Atlanta, also returned to the closest it’s been to normal schooling since March 2020 when it reopened Monday. After the majority of its students remained remote through the last school year, about 95 percent of the district’s 52,000 students returned to in-person learning this week.

“We are ready,” Teffany Bedford, a third-grade teacher at Fountain Elementary School, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “We feel safe. I think it’s going to be great getting back to those face-to-face interactions, which is what we’re used to.”

At her school, only about half of families came back to school last spring, Principal Jamilah Hud-Kirk told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, while this August, all but eight families have chosen to attend in person.

“We’re excited to welcome them,” said Hud-Kirk. “We missed our scholars and they missed us.”

With the Delta variant , masks are required in her building and across Clayton County schools, as they are in San Bernardino. The California district has also installed air filters and updated ventilation systems in each of its schools.

But additionally, the administrators at both Fountain and North Verdemont have put a premium on communicating their reopening plans clearly with families. Both held virtual information sessions for community members to learn about their school’s reopening plan and ask any questions. Last week, teachers at Fountain directly called the households of every student in their classes. Ms. Bedford, as her students call her, was able to connect with the families of every single youngster on her list.

“You have to meet your community where they are,” said Hud-Kirk.

Not all school systems, however, were able to respond as readily to parent concerns. Tucson Unified School District, which ended last year in a hybrid learning scheme and returns students to classrooms Aug. 5, had planned to begin the year without requiring face coverings due to an Arizona state law banning mask mandates. That edict stands even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their school guidance with a recommendation for universal teacher and student masking in late July, and despite State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman calling on the governor’s office to . Gov. Doug Ducey doubled down instead, calling the CDC’s new guidelines “.”

At a school board meeting in late July, a steady stream of public comments prompted Tucson Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo to remind viewers that “the decision of whether or not to mandate masks in any Arizona school or school district is no longer in the hands of any school governing board, superintendent or principal.”

Despite that, at an emergency meeting called the morning before school opened, the Tucson Unified board did just that, . By doing so, the district joined — two of which are in Phoenix — in defiance of the ban.

“They really do have their hands tied,” Clare Robinson, parent of a 7-year-old in the district, lamented before the board voted to disregard state law. The young mother was already planning on sending her child to school clad with a face covering and, at that point, just hoping other parents would do the same.

But without a universal masking policy, Robinson told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ she was worried kids would increasingly skip out on wearing face coverings. At her son’s summer camp, for instance, fewer and fewer kids kept their masks on as the weeks went by, building a social pressure against masking.

Perhaps out of concerns for kids’ safety, slots in the district’s virtual learning program were filling rapidly. On July 20, enrollment had spiked from 700 to 1,200 in just a week. “We are projecting that the numbers will keep going up,” Trujillo said at the time.

Still, the vast majority of the district’s 47,000 students will be attending school in person. As of Aug. 3, only 2,045 students were enrolled in the district’s virtual academy, according to spokesperson Veronica Castro-Vega — that’s slightly below the 5 percent opt-out rates in San Bernardino or Clayton County.

Robinson says many Tucson parents who were uncomfortable with their school’s previous masking policy faced a tough choice, especially if their child struggled with remote learning. On balance, most students tuning in online fared worse than their in-person peers, copious research shows.

“I don’t see [virtual school] as the answer that’s best for the greater good,” said Robinson. For her own family, Robinson had been considering a temporary move to her parents’ home in Berkeley, California, where masks in schools were never in doubt.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona seconds Robinson’s stance, advocating for schools to return students to face-to-face learning this fall — .

“We know that mask wearing and mitigation strategies allow [schools] to reopen safely,” the education secretary told National Public Radio Monday. If increased spread of the virus shutters schools, he said “to me, that’s a failure of adults.”

As the new school year unfolds in San Bernardino, where masking is a non-negotiable, Principal Robel has navigated some unforeseen hurdles: staffing is a bit short, and she wishes her school had held a welcome session for first-graders and their families who, while learning virtually last year, never became familiar with the ins and outs of the building. But the bumps are smoothing out and the principal believes her community can face whatever COVID’s next curve may be for the 2021-22 school year.

“I think they’re feeling cautiously optimistic,” she said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona doesn’t expect to see more enrollment loss in public schools this fall, but said educators must “work twice as hard” to rebuild the trust of some families after a year of remote learning and reopening delays.

“I am confident that everyone wants to return back to school and that schools are doing their best to get students back in. I know in some places it wasn’t quick enough for some families,” the secretary said last week in a brief conversation with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “What we have to ensure is that we’re following the guidelines to make sure that our schools are safe and that we’re engaging our students and families in ways that we haven’t in the past.”

Cardona said he recognized the challenges districts are facing in trying to make up for lost instruction. While he’s encouraged by what he’s seen during his recent visits to summer learning programs, he added that some districts will need to work harder to strengthen connections with other organizations so students can get the “accelerated support” they need to overcome the pandemic’s impact.

“I’ve seen examples of it already — where schools are really stepping up to give students a good opportunity to engage socially and academically,” he said. “I’m expecting with full, in-person options for students that the sense of community and the sense of family that our students and families are longing for, that they’re going to get it.”

Schools, Cardona said, also need to be specific with parents about what safety precautions they’ll be taking this fall.

“I know some schools had major issues they had to address in terms of ventilation systems or ensuring that the environment was safe,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is a health pandemic. We want to make sure that schools are safe for our students and our staff.”

And they should be clear about the opportunities they’re offering to help students make up for instruction they missed last school year, he added.

But the pandemic and learning loss aren’t the only reasons some parents have grown dissatisfied with schools over the summer. some parents want to see different learning options for their children when school starts this fall. And others are outraged over how districts are addressing issues of race and equity in the classroom, with debates dominating school board meetings from coast to coast.

Reiterating what he’s told House members during recent budget hearings, the secretary said the topic has become politicized. But he sympathized with administrators facing pressure over the issue and said he wants to shift attention to the resources schools now have to make school improvements.

Superintendents, “have shown tremendous leadership reopening schools during a pandemic,” he said. “They did their best to make sure that our students got the support that they needed. I don’t just mean a laptop and broadband access, which is in itself a challenge, but making sure our students were fed, making sure that they had the social and emotional support. We owe it to our education community to stand behind them.”

In recent weeks, the secretary has visited summer learning programs in Los Angeles, New Jersey and Oregon, and said even though some districts to find enough staff to work over the summer, he said he’s seen strong examples of schools and nonprofit organizations sharing the responsibility for summer learning.

At the virtual reopening summit Cardona held in March, he said he “jokingly” warned educators that he didn’t want to see students doing any “ditto” sheets this summer and that he hoped for engaging programs that interest students while shoring up some of the academic skills they’ve missed over the past year.

While he said he saw some students writing words on a whiteboard in a classroom in Portland, he said he was happy to report, “I have not seen any worksheets.”

Gov. says he will not impose another statewide mask mandate, despite COVID-19 cases being on the rise again.

“There will be no mask mandate imposed, and the reasons for that are very clear,” Abbott on Tuesday. “There are so many people who have immunities to COVID, whether it be through the vaccination, whether it be through their own exposure and their recovery from it, which would be acquired immunity.”

It would be “inappropriate to require people who already have immunity to wear a mask,” Abbott said.

During a news conference Wednesday in Houston, Abbott went further and expressed blanket resistance to any new restrictions to fight the virus. He said Texas is “past the time of government mandates” and “into the time for personal responsibility.”

While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says fully vaccinated people do not need to , the World Health Organization is still encouraging everyone to wear masks while inside.

As the delta variant has spread, have increased in Texas. Late last week, the state’s positivity rate — the ratio of cases to tests — went above 10% for the first time since February, a threshold that Abbott has previously identified as dangerous.

As of Sunday, 43% of Texans were fully vaccinated.

Abbott in March. The mandate had been in place since summer of last year.

Two months later, he he was banning government entities — including public schools — from mandating masks. Abbott reiterated Tuesday that Texas schoolchildren will not face mask requirements as they return to school later this summer.

“Kids will not be forced by government or by schools to wear masks in school,” Abbott said. “They can by parental choice wear a mask, but there will be no government mandate requiring masks.”

Patrick Svitek is the primary political correspondent for , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Ashley Crandall’s second grade students didn’t like remote learning during the pandemic, and they hated wearing masks.

But they did like keeping their friends and family safe, and, as Crandall told them, the best way to do that was to keep masks up and to social distance.

“It’s bigger than just us,” Crandall reminded the kids when they would complain about the masks. “We have to really think ‘big picture’ about what’s happening in our community.”

Crandall did her best, largely successfully, to keep the scariest parts of the pandemic at bay in her classroom of 19 seven- to nine-year-olds at Democracy Prep at the Stewart Campus on the southeast side of San Antonio ISD which was hit particularly hard by COVID-19.

“They’ve all been impacted in some way,” Crandall said, referring to lost jobs, family members who fell ill or died, and the general anxiety swirling through the community. “School provided a place for students to disconnect from fears that might have been placed on them.”

Because she could provide that safe place, fear, happiness, and relief showed up in artwork the students created for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, when they were asked to illustrate the “best” and “most challenging” parts of the year. The drawings conveyed two distinct messages:

First, the kids loved their friends, teacher, and community, and had suffered during remote learning.

Second, the kids saw the value in safety protocols even though they hated the masks.

One girl even added a little second-grader shade to her response, “I like how people couldn’t get in my fase [sic] because of Covid.”

The mental health effects of the pandemic went beyond fear, grief, and loss related to the virus, and even the additional economic strain placed on families. Experts say the disruption and discomfort of safety protocols were stressful for kids.

“Kids are more sensitive, they’re not all rolling with the punches,” said school counselor Phyllis Fagell, author of the book Middle School Matters. It’s the job of the adults in their lives to keep stress from turning into anxiety by giving them tools to cope, she said.

Powerlessness — feeling that the pandemic and all of its protocols have been forced upon them — was part of the stress, Fagell said.

Having the power to help protect their loved ones and friends could actually help, if framed correctly, Fagell said. “We want them to focus on what they can control and what they care about.”

That’s a lesson that extends beyond the pandemic. Mask-wearing isn’t the last opportunity kids will have to embrace an inconvenience or disruption by seeing it as a contribution to their community.

Crandall’s success in helping alleviate her students’ anxiety meant that the kids didn’t feel the urgency of mask wearing out of fear. She instead had to appeal to their shared values as a class — empathy for those who might have been fearful, civic duty to “slow the spread”, and care for the health of others.

So instead of “the school is making me wear this uncomfortable mask,” Crandall would emphasize that choosing to wear a mask is a way to strengthen the community bond, because they knew they were sacrificing some comfort to keep each other safe.

The mind-shift worked: “keeping our community safe” was the best part of the year, student David Sutton said.

Lead photos by Bekah McNeel, design by Cheryn Hong

Updated 

For years, kids in Veronica Salgado’s “transition camps” have enrolled because they are anxious about making the challenging leap from elementary to middle school, or from middle to high school.

But this summer, after more than a year of isolation, the struggle to keep up with online learning and little contact with friends, Salgado, Youth Development Manager for Family Service Association, and her team are seeing bigger problems than just helping kids figure out how to find their lockers or make new friends.

Anxiety levels are skyrocketing as kids worry about their ability to keep up with school work, focus in a room full of peers, and navigate social situations with peers they have not seen face-to-face in more than a year. The need is so great that some of the kids in the camp are in non-transitioning grades.

“It’s all hands on deck, for sure,” said Salgado of the camps, hosted in coordination with school districts, and now connected to a hub of mental health services, many established just months before the pandemic hit in March 2020 in what was once a mental health desert on San Antonio’s South Side.

Counselors say it was just in time too: The six organizations at the hub were inundated with requests for services during the pandemic. Now, with the pandemic waning and re-entry weighing on the minds of anxious students and families, they are going full steam to prevent disaster.

At the transition camp, Salgado and her colleagues are on alert for signs of what educators and healthcare providers are calling a “second pandemic” of mental health issues in young people.

“We want to keep them as motivated as possible,” Salgado said. Without someone making a deliberate effort to draw them out, she said, many remote learners will not simply bounce back into the social rhythms of school. “They just go back into their shell.”

While students are participating in transition camps, other family members can access counseling, addiction support, and parenting classes.

The pandemic itself originally accelerated the demand for mental healthcare. Where they had expected to provide about 300 people with counseling and related services in their first few months with the collaborative, said Talli Dolge, CEO of Jewish Family Service, which provides counseling services at the hub, by May 2020 her organization saw over 1,600.

Demand stayed strong in the next school year: From August 1, 2020 to May 27, 2021, the collaborative served 4,619 people.

Most of the counseling during the pandemic had to do with grief and fear as jobs disappeared, loved ones fell ill, and domestic violence increased.

The collaborative weathered the pandemic with telehealth, including donating burner phones to families who didn’t have access to the necessary technology. Family Services continued seeing clients in person, and Communities in Schools, another collaborative partner, made house calls.

But now there is a new issue: re-entry.

Kids started going back to school mid-year, Dolge said, and instantly the mental health crises exploded — the hazards of being isolated at home gave way to all out panic over returning to school.

“The crisis rates are up tremendously,” Dolge said. “Social anxiety is huge and across the board.”

It’s a daunting forecast, but two years ago it would have been devastating.

In 2018 student advocates in South San Antonio ISD hadn’t begun speaking out on the mental health challenges they faced, and the extraordinary lengths they had to go to in order to get help. Texas ranks 50h out of 51 states (and the District of Columbia) in access to mental healthcare for children and adults, and the situation is far worse for lower income communities like the South Side of San Antonio.

The first Mobile Mental Wellness hub opened at a building on the campus of a South San Antonio ISD elementary school in November 2019, not knowing then that a once-in-a-lifetime crisis would soon begin on the other side of the globe.

Going forward, organizations like Rise Recovery, a hub partner, will have their work cut out for them. Alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drug abuse rose during the pandemic as teens self-medicated in isolation.

Experts say they won’t really know how much until students return to school, where the eyes of teachers, coaches, and counselors can spot the warning signs.

What worries Rise Recovery CEO Evita Morin and others are the new cases, the ones that have been hidden behind screens during remote learning.

“The lack of data (during the pandemic was) disturbing,” said Morin said, “I’m not a fan of disciplining kids with addiction, but at least before COVID schools were catching drug use and they could report it to us.”

Because Texas schools started bringing a percentage of students back in the fall of 2020, educators got early glimpses of the coming mental health crisis. So, even with the pandemic still raging in San Antonio, other school districts asked the collaborative to set up shop in their district.

Neighboring school district Harlandale ISD launched their hub in November 2020, and Edgewood ISD, where the pandemic was falling heavily on working class and impoverished neighborhoods on the city’s West Side opened a hub in January 2021.

Altogether the three hubs have created mental healthcare access for 23,535 students from pre-k to twelfth grade.

For many, Dolge knows, the suffering is only getting deeper as the world moves forward, and traumas, anxieties, and grief goes unaddressed. She’s trying to raise more awareness in the community that help is within reach.

“If you didn’t know where to get help before,” Dolge said, “It’s so much more important to get help now.”

For mental health support related to COVID-19, call Texas’s 24/7 at 833-986-1919. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text 741741 from anywhere in the country to text with a trained crisis counselor. 

Dallas principal Ruby Ramirez knew trouble was brewing when the school counselor came to her office looking grim.

A once gregarious, curious student was disappearing before their eyes, the counselor told her, rarely speaking in class, ignoring his work and classmates, and combing his hair forward over his eyes as if to block out the world.

The bright middle schooler had been struggling with remote learning, and Dallas Independent School District’s School for the Talented and Gifted was able to convince his parents to send him to school in-person, hoping that would reignite his love of learning.

It didn’t.

The counselor also had an ominous message for Ramierez:

“He’s not the only one.”

That’s when Ramirez knew for sure: the second pandemic, the pervasive mental health challenges facing youth around the world, was at her doorstep. If her school didn’t get out ahead of it, they could lose their students. With the looming crisis, Ramierez decided it was time to revisit her training.

“We have work to do,” Ramirez said. Once she saw students’ languishment extending beyond remote learning, enduring into the school building, she knew deeper challenges awaited. “We had gotten to a point where the desire was fading.”

It was time to prepare her staff for the challenges to come.

Mental health professionals and doctors around the globe are warning that after more than a year of stress, isolation, grief, and fear, students will not simply spring back into school. Young people everywhere from to to the are reporting more anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms.

In addition to withdrawal, increased moodiness and volatility, parents are reporting terrifying instances of self-harm, or young children expressing thoughts of suicide, which have led to a nationwide for children under 18.

The CDC reported that between April and October 2020, the proportion of emergency department visits for kids ages 5 to 11 was up 24% from the same period in 2019, the proportion of visits for 12–17 year-olds increased by 31%. Experts say the stressors of the pandemic have added to the already mounting crisis of anxiety-related disorders in , some as young as eight years old.

As a result, demand for the Mental Health First Aid courses is soaring among teachers, counselors, coaches — people who interact with kids, said Judith Allen, a certified Mental Health First Aid instructor.

Through her , Allen trained 500 adults this spring, and the nonprofit will triple instructors to meet demand this fall. The online courses made it possible for people from across the country to participate.

During her youth-oriented course — roughly seven to eight hours between the pre-work online, class session, and assessment — adult participants started by learning a foundational truth: administering first aid is not about the adult saving the day.

“You’re not a superhero, there’s no cape,” Allen said. In a session in early April, she showed the online group several scenarios where an adult might be tempted to come up with the saving insight or even offer an arm-chair diagnosis. The students in the scenarios expressing loneliness, hopelessness, and lack of motivation mirrored what parents and teachers are describing seeing more of in the wake of the pandemic.

Seeing a kid in crisis elicits a strong desire to save the day, Allen said, but rather than focusing on saying the right words to inspire, motivate, or even break through to a teen going through a mental health challenge, the training encouraged adults to be observant and open, listening to students without judgement or quick answers.

“(CPR training) does not qualify you to crack open their chest and massage their heart,” Allen told our class. She compared this to Mental Health First Aid: offering advice, diagnosis, or counseling should be left to professionals. “No one is leaving here with a doctorate in psychology or psychiatry.”

That didn’t mean walking away without new knowledge. Merely spotting trouble among adolescents can feel like something that requires just those degrees sometimes, and that’s where the course does offer tools most adults don’t already have, like looking for warning signs, indicators that something was amiss with the teen.

As students flood back into classrooms, experts are warning that the anxiety and mental health challenges could increase. Knowing the warning signs will be key to catching challenges early, getting the young person professional help, and possibly saving a life.

The course explained developmentally appropriate pulling away from family, changes in interests, and emotional expression and compared that to signs of trouble.

While most teens will pull away from family to some degree, pulling away from friends and mentors at the same time could be a sign of trouble.

Changing interests from childhood hobbies to more socially or ambitiously motivated interests is also typical. Losing interest and motivation in every area is a warning sign.

Watching the videos, it’s clear that a mental health challenge would be hard to spot from one interaction with a teenager. It was also understandable why signs were so much harder to spot over zoom: the intensity, frequency, duration of the warning sign is what Mental Health First Aid responders should note. While teachers might notice withdrawal or lack of motivation over Zoom, it was hard to tell where else that might be showing up. As Ramirez had noted, remote learning was tough for everyone, and it was hard to tell whether a child was experiencing Zoom fatigue or something more pernicious.

Teachers, coaches, and youth leaders who see the kids regularly and in person are ideally situated to catch the red flags when kids go back to school. Seeing students day in and day out will allow them to track the moods and behaviors that might need to be addressed. A bad day is going to happen, but lots of worsening bad days that extend into bad weeks is a sign of a mental health challenge.

Much of the data presented in the course helped lay people understand the difference between a mental health challenge and mental illnesses or disorders. One in five young people must manage a longer term mental illness in order to thrive, but many more will face a mental health challenge—for instance, a season of depression, substance abuse, or anxiety— during adolescence.

Thriving with a mental illness or disorder is possible if it’s properly managed, Allen reiterated during the training, just like with chronic physical conditions.

The converse is true as well. Mental health challenges can occur in people with no underlying mental illness.

That’s what’s going to be so tricky for teachers, experts warn. The conditions are right for just about anyone to have a mental health challenge in the next year. At the same time, mental illness, especially those illnesses related to trauma, will likely show itself more readily.

In some ways, Ramirez has been in the eye of that hurricane for a long time, though. Nearly half of all mental illnesses present by age 14, the last year of middle school.

Children who grow up in poverty, like 88% of the students at the School for the Talented and Gifted, are at for mental disorders, toxic stress, and trauma. They’ve also been more heavily impacted by the pandemic.

“It’s scary,” Ramirez said, “Traumas have set in for our students, in their minds, in their thinking, that are really going to hinder them forever if we don’t address them.”

Ramirez first took a Mental Health First Aid course, along with her administrative team, in 2018 through Mental Health America of Greater Dallas. Students are taught how to look out for each other as well. This year, with the increased urgency of the pandemic, 10 more staff members took the class so that a quarter of the adults on the School for the Talented and Gifted campus will be certified in Mental Health First Aid. She’s hoping to get parents to enroll as well.

“It changed the way that I saw mental health,” Ramirez said, “It helped destigmatize, for me and my administrative staff, mental health.”

For mental health support related to COVID-19, call Texas’s 24/7 at 833-986-1919. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text 741741 from anywhere in the country to text with a trained crisis counselor.

Momentum may be building toward a full school reopening this fall, but some families say it’s too late.

“My daughter will never go back to public school,” said Michelle Walker of McMinnville, Oregon, outside Portland. She took out a loan to move her fourth-grader MacKenzie into a private school and is working to mobilize families in reopening groups across the country to do something similar.

Nationally, public schools lost 1.5 million students last school year — roughly a 3 percent drop and the largest since the beginning of the century, according to federal data. Much of that enrollment decline was driven by parents holding their kindergartners out a year. The question now is whether the profound frustration over remote learning and mask mandates, combined with recent outrage over critical race theory, could motivate more families to seek other options.

Experts say it’s too soon to know for sure whether enrollment loss will continue, but some see signs that the downward trend isn’t over.

In Virginia’s , officials initially projected that the 2,000 students who left the district last school year would return this fall. But in May, board members said they weren’t so sure and were recalculating the budget based on a lower figure of 28,500 students, down from almost 30,000.

Some of those families not returning could be homeschooling, according to a from the Home School Legal Defense Association, which suggested the jump in that population seen last year will continue. And EdChoice’s surveys showed in homeschoolers from 8 percent in 2020 to 14 percent this year

Walker, an organizer of , is among those calling for parents to abandon public schools. The volunteer network of reopening advocates plans to announce a “słÙ°ùŸ±°ì±đ” Thursday, with parents pledging to homeschool or enroll their children in pods or private schools this fall. Across various platforms including Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and email, Walker said the network has reached roughly 180,000 participants. In Oregon alone, the group’s goal is to see 30 percent of the state’s more than 560,000 students withdraw before October, which would drastically impact state funding for education.

‘Attacks on public education’

Whether the group has the power to follow through on its bold promise or not, one thing is clear: District leaders are they won’t make up last year’s enrollment as they watch more students leave for . Some hope to to school this fall, using outreach methods such as text messages and home visits. And public school advocates are worried about the lingering impact of school board protests over critical race theory.

Joshua Starr, CEO of PDK International, a professional organization that the public annually on attitudes toward public schools, said parents value racial diversity in schools. A couple months ago he thought the uproar surrounding anti-racist efforts would blow over.

“Now I think otherwise,” he said, but added there is not yet reliable data on what “the silent, but reasonable, majority actually thinks” about the theory.

New voters shows more than half of parents feel positive toward public schools in general and even more positive toward their local schools, with 60 percent giving them an A or B. But Bruce Fuller, an education and sociology researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said “a slice of parents still appear angry over union leaders’ reticence to reopen schools last winter, even after the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] gave its OK.”

He predicted further jumps in enrollment by August, especially if districts don’t allow virtual or more personalized options for families who prefer that.

The California survey didn’t specifically ask about critical race theory — a legal argument that racism is embedded in U.S. systems and institutions. But Democrats and Republicans were split over whether schools should spend more time on lessons about racism and inequality.

Open Schools USA formed in November over the reopening issue. In March, organizers held marking one year of the pandemic in at least 50 cities. But Eileen Chollet, a Fairfax, Virginia, parent who interacts with Walker’s group through Facebook, said she wondered whether it had enough organizing power to “stage a national campaign.”

But Sarah Ronchak, an Elk River, Minnesota, parent and another Open Schools USA organizer, said their efforts are part of a broader movement away from traditional schools.“It will definitely take off,” she said. “However, it may take one more year of public school for people that are on the fence to really make a move on it.”

Ronchak, a full-time youth basketball referee, said she got involved with the group because “distance learning was an absolute nightmare” for her autistic son. And when he returned to school in February, he was bullied for not wearing a mask even though he had an exemption, she said. Minnesota has lifted its statewide mask mandate, but some local jurisdictions haven’t. She said she’ll likely homeschool this fall.

Walker said the group has members across the political spectrum, but their concerns have expanded to include potential COVID-19 vaccination requirements and universal mask use, issues that more conservatives have opposed. Nonetheless, she added, they recoil at the term “Trumpers.” The leaders ran a GoFundMe campaign to set up their website, but otherwise the group has no outside funders. Walker spends her own money on flyers, posters and graphic design.

Some organizers of the group are also active in , which has filed litigation over practices in schools related to critical race theory. Founder Elana Yaron Fishbein has become a leading voice on Fox News arguing schools are trying to indoctrinate children, and members of local chapters are behind many of the at school board meetings.

“Parents want children to learn about racism. We don’t want it taught necessarily in the way that it is,” said Walker, a Democrat. “If you’re going to tell the bad and the ugly, you need to tell the good and the beautiful.”

National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues said Open Schools USA has sought guidance from her group in the past, but is not an affiliate. Rodrigues, however, agrees more families may be considering other options this fall.

“We watched a nationwide failure of our public education system,” she said. “I expect to see a percentage of parents that say, ‘I’ve actually found something that works better for my kids.’”

The National Parents Union’s most shows that more than 40 percent of parents would still choose online learning or a hybrid model this fall, but the survey didn’t specifically ask about leaving public schools.

Walker’s hope is that if districts see more enrollment loss, they’ll pay more attention to the needs of parents.

“After their numbers drop drastically, our hope is to be afforded a meeting where we can negotiate terms of enrollment,” she said. “It’s insane that no one has represented our children throughout the decision-making process that directly affected them.”

When the RAND Corp. during the winter, COVID-19 health concerns, delaying kindergarten and opposition to virtual instruction were the leading reasons behind enrollment loss, not “politically motivated anti-[critical race theory] reasons,” said Heather Schwartz, a senior researcher at RAND. But she added, “the subject is fast-moving.”

Khalilah Harris, acting vice president for K-12 policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, characterized the protests over critical race theory as mostly a fringe issue, but added “fringe can become mainstream with the right messaging.” She doesn’t, however, expect “large swaths of communities would move their children to private school and explain it as a result of not wanting students to learn difficult yet accurate American history.”

Some advocates for in-person learning have never strayed from their core issue. They include Chollet, a member of Open Fairfax County Schools. The Fairfax district students last year, but is expecting to regain most of that this fall.

Some partisan Democrats tend to “paint all parents in favor of open schools as right-wing astroturf,” she said. “I won’t deny that the reopening groups are probably redder than the surrounding areas, but Fairfax is one of the bluest areas in the country.”

Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s daily newsletter.

F°ùŸ±»ćČčČâ’s from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts districts in a tough spot — do they require all students to wear masks indoors or just those who haven’t been vaccinated?

District leaders say it would be difficult to implement a policy where masks are optional for some but not others.

“The return for this school year will require a societal pact to protect one another by ensuring each of us follows the guidance that applies to us,” said Tony Sanders, superintendent of School District U-46, outside Chicago. On Friday, the district announced it would maintain universal mask requirements for the rest of summer school, but would revisit the issue before school starts.

With about a month to go before some schools reopen for the new school year, the latest update aligns with the Biden administration’s push toward full reopening and eliminates the need for districts to reduce the number of students in buildings in order to maintain social distancing — a strategy that created most of last school year. Surveys show parents are growing more comfortable with the idea of full in-person learning this fall. But for some, the issue remains unusually divisive. Some say they don’t feel safe letting their children return without mask mandates in place and others say they won’t return because of mask requirements.

‘2019 or bust’

, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii and Virginia, still have mask mandates, even for those already vaccinated.

In response to the updated CDC guidance lifting mask requirements for those already vaccinated, California announced Friday that it would keep  in place for students this fall to “ensure that all kids are treated the same,” according to a statement from the state’s public health department.ÌęBut then on Monday, officials tweeted that they would leave those decisions up to local districts. Requirements in other states could change in the coming weeks as well.

“We expect our updated guidance 
 to align closely with the CDC’s recommendations and to continue making the health and safety of children a priority,” said a statement from the New Mexico Department of Education. The state relaxed requirements for vaccinated children and adults in May, but kept the rule in place for schools. And Oregon is now recommending, rather than mandating, mask use in its .

In states that lifted mask mandates earlier this year, districts that continue to require them are seeing increased pressure from some parents to relax the rules. In Florida’s Broward County Public Schools, board members faced accusations of for requiring students to wear masks. A spokeswoman said the district is reviewing the CDC update and will discuss any changes later this month.

Nevada will require different mask rules depending on students’ grade level — a May policy that sparked and calls from parents in the Clark County School District to leave mask decisions up to them. According to a state directive, masks for students in third grade and below are optional, while students over 12 are eligible for vaccines. Therefore, only fourth and fifth graders will be required to wear masks, but the policy may be updated further based on the new guidance, according to the state.

In Medford, New Jersey, east of Philadelphia, Kristin Sinclair said her 7-year-old son won’t return to public school if masks are required.

“It’s 2019 or bust,” she said. “If it doesn’t look normal, I’m sending him to private daycare or I’ll quit my job and homeschool.”

Others, however, aren’t ready for students to go maskless. from the National Parents Union shows 45 percent of parents who kept their children out of school the entire year want all students and staff to wear masks. And a third of those who stayed with remote learning this year want all students to be vaccinated before they’ll feel comfortable sending their children back to school.

But in general, parents are less hesitant for their children to return to in-person learning than they were in the spring. A poll released last week shows almost three-quarters of parents are somewhat or totally comfortable with sending their children back to class.

‘Starting to follow the science’

Experts that have been pushing for a full return to school welcomed the update.

The CDC is “finally starting to follow science,” said Dr. Daniel Benjamin, a pediatrics professor at Duke University in North Carolina. “Remote instruction for all K-12 students is malpractice.”

He applauded the recommendation that schools should remain open regardless of community-level transmission rates. But while the guidance still lists quarantining as a possible mitigation strategy, Benjamin said vaccinated students and those without symptoms don’t need to quarantine if they’re wearing masks.

“At the moment, the CDC complicates this simple message,” he said.

Some experts wonder how the guidance will impact COVID-19 testing programs. Districts, such as Los Angeles and San Antonio implemented extensive testing programs last school year. And the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment a new testing program for schools this fall.

But the CDC said at this point, such programs are more valuable in communities with high levels of transmission and that vaccinated students and staff don’t need to be tested. Benjamin added that science doesn’t support widespread testing if districts continue to require masks.

Testing does have some merit, he added, among unvaccinated and unmasked students and for those participating in sports and extracurricular activities, such as band.

The guidance comes as some states are seeing in positive cases, driven by the Delta variant. But officials stress the increases are largely concentrated in states with low vaccination rates and that almost all due to COVID-19 are among unvaccinated people.

The CDC guidance removes any speculation that schools will need to separate vaccinated from unvaccinated students. That would have been a “scheduling nightmare,” especially in middle schools where roughly a third of students still aren’t eligible for the vaccine, said Tom Phillips, executive director of the New York State Middle School Association and a former superintendent.

Districts where administrators have drawn clear lines between vaccinated and unvaccinated students have faced some pushback. In June, a New Hampshire high school for marking unvaccinated students’ hands with a Sharpie at the prom. And the Southfield Public Schools, north of Detroit, faced charges of discrimination when it accepted from an organization picking up the cost of prom tickets only for vaccinated students.

Separating students by vaccination status — which have already suggested for sporting events, businesses and churches — would create “an atmosphere that stigmatizes students,” Phillips said, and would be “harmful to the entire school community.”

What made so many K-12 schools stick with remote learning to begin the 2020-21 school year, even as others reopened their doors to in-person or hybrid instruction?

According to a slew of research that emerged last year, much of the answer boils down to simple politics. Multiple studies from political scientists at Michigan State University, Boston College, and the Brookings Institution suggested that school reopening decisions were significantly more correlated with local political affiliation — as measured by the results of the 2016 election, or sometimes by strength of teachers’ unions — than the prevalence of COVID-19. Like so many other events in American life, our responses to the pandemic were heavily governed by how we vote.

But a new analysis complicates that picture somewhat. The paper, released on Monday by Tulane University’s National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, confirms that politics helped determine how local authorities responded to the coronavirus threat in schools. But reopening approaches were also closely correlated with community demographics, and health conditions played a role as well. What’s more, given the interdependent relationships between all of those variables, it’s extremely challenging to isolate just one as being the most influential on policy makers’ decisions last fall.

Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane and one of the report’s co-authors, said in an interview that the mix of potential causes yielded “probably the least amount of certainty about what the actual conclusions are of any study I’ve ever done.”

“In this case, that’s part of the point,” Harris said. “What we thought was certain is actually a little more uncertain, and given the political polarization we’re in right now, we don’t want to overstate the role of politics here.”

Using data on over 1,100 school district reopening decisions from Burbio.com, Harris and Tulane research fellow Daniel Oliver examined which stayed remote or switched to in-person learning both last fall and in the spring of 2021. Without weighting by state or district size — a small district’s decision counted as much as a large one’s — they then examined the respective racial and socioeconomic demographics of each area, their COVID positivity rates, the county-level vote share won by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, as well as factors like local charter school enrollment and broadband access.

As in previous studies, they found that partisanship was an important determinant of whether schools opted for virtual learning to begin the 2020-21 school year. An increase in Clinton’s 2016 vote by 14 percent was associated with a 10.5 percentage point increase in the chance that local schools stayed remote. Whether teachers were allowed to collectively bargain was also linked to COVID decisions.

But a variety of demographic factors clearly play a role as well. Black, Hispanic, and low-income people living in a district were all associated with higher likelihoods that virtual learning continued last fall. Those trends dovetail with public opinion research released over the last year, which has that non-white parents are more concerned about the return to physical classrooms than their white counterparts.

Harris said that while 2016 voting patterns were the single strongest indicator of how districts acted, the totality of demographic evidence was equally compelling.

“You’ve really got one measure of political dynamics — two, if you include union strength — whereas demographics represents a set of factors,” said Harris. “Individually, they all look not as significant as that Democratic vote share, [but] collectively, they may be just as important.”

The effects of most district traits were substantially similar in both fall 2020 and spring 2021. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2016 partisanship was somewhat less significant following the ultra-contentious 2020 election, even while it remained the most predictive single factor. The predictiveness of COVID positivity rates was also reduced, to the extent that it was no longer statistically significant.

To make matters more complex, Harris added, demographics and politics can’t be isolated from one another. Black and Hispanic voters, along with voters living in poverty, are more likely to vote Democratic; according to public health data they were also much more likely to find themselves at risk from the effects of COVID. All of it, Harris argued, made it necessary to avoid elevating one condition, such as politics, above others.

“Part of what we were trying to highlight was how connected those things were, and how it makes it pretty difficult when voting patterns are closely connected to demographics — race and income patterns — and those things, in turn, are closely correlated with COVID health risk. Whenever you have a bunch of interconnected factors like that, which are probably all playing some role, it becomes difficult to isolate one.”

Vaccinated students and school staff don’t have to wear masks and schools shouldn’t maintain hybrid attendance plans just to implement social distancing, according to from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday.

While the update recommends schools maintain 3 feet of distance between students, that strategy shouldn’t come at the expense of fully reopening, the CDC said. The agency is recommending that schools continue to enforce masks indoors for unvaccinated students and adults, and to continue implementing other practices including COVID-19 testing, handwashing and proper ventilation.

“Promoting vaccination can help schools safely return to in-person learning as well as extracurricular activities and sports,” according to the guidance.

With some schools opening in early August, the guidance provides districts time to plan reopening procedures, communicate policies regarding masks and encourage more families to vaccinate their children. Meanwhile, some districts, such as the Chicago Public Schools, are facing demands from their unions to hit of at least 80 percent of students over 12. And between the Los Angeles district and its union includes mask requirements for all students and staff, regardless of vaccination status. Each school would also have a COVID-19 compliance task force.

In a statement, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the new CDC guidance is “grounded in both science and common sense.”

“The guidance confirms two truths: that students learn better in the classroom, and that vaccines remain our best bet to stop the spread of this virus and get our kids and educators fully back to those classrooms for in-person learning,” according to the statement.

But she said the union remains concerned about the Delta variant of the disease. Cities such as Los Angeles are beginning to see in cases due to the strain, and Pfizer and BioNTech have announced they are developing a specifically for that variant. At this time, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are a booster for those who are fully vaccinated.

Weingarten added that AFT affiliates are holding vaccination clinics in their communities to get more adults and children vaccinated before the return of school. President Joe Biden and first lady have also been visiting communities to promote vaccination. The president has called for a to encourage those who are hesitant to get shots, but conservatives about government intrusion.

The new CDC guidance recommends district leaders monitor local transmission rates when deciding whether to relax any prevention strategies.

Read the full guidance document .

Almost all schools with fourth and eighth grades were offering some in-person learning as the end of the school year approached, but more than half of students at those levels remained in hybrid or fully remote programs, according to the final round of school reopening data from the Institute of Education Sciences.

The latest update of the 2021 School Survey, released Thursday, shows the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning continuing to inch upward, but still falling at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person learning, with 55 percent remaining in remote-only classes.

“Reopening schools and welcoming back students was the first step, but the hardest work is still to come,” Institute for Education Sciences Director Mark Schneider said in a statement. “We must do all we can as a nation to ensure that all students, especially the most high-need students who have already borne the brunt of the coronavirus and its effects, recover from any learning losses.”

The Department of Education launched the in March to comply with an President Joe Biden issued on his first full day in office. At the state and national level, the data confirmed that white students were returning to in-person learning at higher rates than Black, Hispanic and Asian students. It also revealed that some students in remote learning were receiving no more than two hours or less of live instruction each day. With many districts continuing to offer remote options this fall, elementary-age students still not eligible for vaccines and rising concerns over whether the Delta variant of COVID-19 could lead to increased transmission rates, a mixture of schooling arrangements will continue this fall.

, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom is requiring districts to offer families with a medically fragile child a remote, independent study option for the 2021-22 school year. And the from the National Parents Union shows that a third of parents plan to hold their children out until they are vaccinated.

“While the positive overall trends continue, and more Black and Hispanic fourth and eighth graders were being offered and enrolled in in-person instruction, disparities remain,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “As a nation, we cannot rest until all students — including students of color and other historically and presently underserved students — have an equal opportunity to receive in-person instruction in school buildings that are fully reopened and safe.”

While Black and Hispanic students were more likely than Asian students to attend in-person learning in the spring, recent surveys, including one from the RAND Corp., show that preference for online learning is higher among Black and Hispanic parents. A University of Southern California survey shows 15 percent of Black parents plan to keep their children in remote learning, and in Los Angeles shows that bullying, racism and low academic standards, in addition to COVID-19, are among the reasons Black parents kept their children home in the spring.

“It’s great that more districts are adding virtual options, but they really need to be of consistently high quality,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. “I’m skeptical that will be the case given the struggles we saw last year. It’s critical that districts up their game in remote learning by pursuing creative partnerships and by providing intensive teacher training.”

The institute will monitor school options and families’ choices with a new survey launching in August. Designed to build on existing data and capture the pandemic’s ongoing impact on students, the School Pulse Panel will track enrollment in 1,200 elementary, middle and high schools and cover issues such as health and safety, special education and mental health.

Anna Saavedra, a behavioral scientist at the University of Southern California, said spending federal relief funds to make improvements to ventilation systems, air-conditioning and bathrooms are one way to make families feel more positive about the return to school this fall. Communicating COVID-19 prevention strategies could be especially important for Asian families, she added.

“Asian-American families were more cautious in their behaviors about COVID-19 than other racial groups,” she said. “Asian-American families also experienced more discrimination. So particularly for this group, and especially with the dominance of the Delta strain, communication about COVID-19 mitigation practices and weekly case rates will be important.

Using the rest of the summer as a way to rebuild connections with parents and students is also important, she said.

“Districts and schools need to learn what local parents want and clearly communicate a whole-child focus and benefits for students and their families,” she said. “Parents will need more communication than they’ve ever received in the past and for districts to act upon their input.”

Other findings from the latest release include:

• The Midwest saw the highest rate of students attending full-time, in-person learning, with 64 percent of fourth-graders and 59 percent of eighth-graders.
• The percentage of students enrolled in full-time, in-person learning increased for white, Black and Hispanic students between April and May, but not for Asian students.
• The survey aimed to capture data from 3,500 schools each at fourth and eighth grade, but participation lagged. The latest results reflect results from 2,100 schools with fourth grades and 2,000 schools with eighth grades.

But new findings suggest that among many families, demand for remote or hybrid learning may not be so great.

More than eight in 10 parents surveyed (84 percent) now say they plan to send at least one of their children back for in-person schooling this fall, with another 12 percent unsure of their plans. Just five percent plan to keep their children home for the upcoming school year.

But the findings, released Thursday by researchers at the RAND Corp., come with stark differences between white parents and parents of color, among others.

Black and Hispanic parents “are the ones who are least sure they’re going to send their kids back to school in person,” said RAND researcher Heather Schwartz. While just 10 percent of white parents said they’re “not sure” of their plans or that they plan to keep their kids home, 28 percent of Black parents and 27 percent of Hispanic parents said the same.

If they do send their children back, she noted, most want mask mandates. That’s true of 86 percent of black parents, 78 percent of Hispanic parents, and 89 percent of Asian parents. By contrast, just 53 percent of white parents feel the same way.

Parents of color also want regular COVID testing — the split between black and white parents, for instance, is nearly 40 percentage points (74 vs. 36 percent).

In many districts, researchers have noted, Black families have been reluctant to let their children return to in-person school, often citing distrust in schools’ or discipline policies. In Chicago earlier this year, average in-person attendance for white students was 73 percent, the reported. For Black students, it was less than 50 percent.

Even the that parents of color are “more concerned about some aspects of school reopening, such as compliance with mitigation measures, safety, and their child contracting or bringing home COVID-19,” than were white parents.

In a New York Times op-ed this week, RiShawn Biddle, a fellow with the non-partisan think tank , said recent announcements by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to end remote instruction in the fall are “bad news for a majority of the country’s Black, Latino and Asian students and their parents who wish to keep virtual learning as an option.” The move, Biddle said, “exacerbates already-existing educational and health care inequities.”

Despite the differences, however, Schwartz said one finding seems fairly consistent: “Across the board, parents want ventilation,” she said.

Classroom ventilation is the top measure parents say schools must put in place for them to feel safe sending their children back to school in person — it’s more important than masks, social distancing and even teacher vaccinations, the data show.

Schwartz said the survey suggests that schools could allay parents’ fears by “communicating very clearly about what specific safety measures they are putting in place.”

Overall, two-thirds of parents want schools to keep COVID-19 safety measures, though rural and white parents are much more likely to prefer that schools “reduce or discontinue” their pandemic-related safety precautions. Black, Hispanic, Asian, and urban parents are much more likely to prefer that schools keep them, according to the survey, which was administered to 2,015 parents from April 30 to May 11.

Among parents who don’t plan to send their children to school this fall, the top reasons are safety-related. Nearly one in three (31 percent) said, “My child(ren) feel safer in remote school,” while nearly as many said they’re concerned about their child transmitting or contracting COVID-19.

Twenty-two percent said they’re staying home because their children “like remote school better.”

And just five percent said they prefer homeschooling their children, while only two percent said their children either have a job they’d have to quit or that they must care for younger siblings.

For Maritza Guridy, a mother of four in Philadelphia, safety is a big concern. She plans to send her children back to in-person schooling in the fall — Guridy is a secretary at the school that three of them will attend. But she understands that nervous parents want choices, especially those in multi-generational homes or with immunocompromised family members.

“The fact that some states are deciding not to even give parents a choice is very unfair,” she said. “There are a lot of parents that are still very scared and very worried because they’re still not even sure with certainty as to whether or not other children or even adults in the building have been vaccinated or are COVID-free.”

At her school, Guridy said, adults have been tested weekly since April. “Not every school district, not every school across the country, has had that possibility,” she said. “And there are still adults that for their own personal reasons have chosen not to vaccinate themselves.”

The new survey results also suggest that children’s vaccinations, while a game-changer for many families, aren’t finding universal acceptance among parents. Just 52 percent said they planned to vaccinate their children, while another 17 percent were “unsure.”

The Biden administration has pushed to get 70 percent of eligible Americans vaccinated by July 4, last month announcing a partnership with the ride-sharing companies Lyft and Uber to provide free rides to vaccination sites. Biden also said the nation’s largest community colleges will host vaccination clinics through the end of June. In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will fund “on-the-ground efforts” to promote vaccination, such as phone banking, door-to-door canvassing, and pop-up vaccination sites in workplaces and churches.

The new findings stand in stark contrast to this spring. One, from NPR, found that 29 percent of parents were “likely to stick with remote learning indefinitely.”

A by the National Parents Union found similar results to NPR in most regions: in the Midwest, 21 percent of parents said they preferred hybrid instruction to in-person instruction.

RAND’s Schwartz noted that her data have a large, 12 percent “undecided” group to consider. She also said a portion of the difference in findings could be due to how the survey questions are worded. Unlike others, hers didn’t ask parents about preferences — it asked about actual plans. “It’s a little more cut-and-dried,” she said. “It’s not ‘What would you like? Would you like an option?’ When you think about it, who doesn’t like an option?”

Brooklyn, N.Y., parent Amanda Zinoman said she’s ready for in-person schooling to resume. “I’m very excited for my son to go back to school full-time,” she said. “But I understand that if you don’t want to send your kid to school, there should be an alternative.”

Zinoman, whose 11-year-old, Jonah, has attended his small public middle school from home all year, said she has all but written off 2020-2021, which she said “feels like a bit of a lost year” for him.

“I think it’s a tough situation all around,” she said, “but my feeling is that kids need to be in school. I think that kids who thrive at home are a small minority — especially at my son’s age, adolescence. They need the social [interaction], they need the attention, and they need to be with people other than their parents.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said Monday he wants “families at the table” as schools prepare for the fall, offering welcome news to parents who have felt shut out of efforts to help their children recover from the pandemic.

Last week, his staff took steps to fill up the guest list by contacting the , a network of advocacy groups that has been critical of distance learning, especially for low-income and minority students, and has pushed for schools to reopen.

On April 28, Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secretary of Education, met with Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union’s founding president, and Marisol Rerucha, the group’s chief of strategy and partnerships.

Since then, the group’s representatives have been asked to work with the department’s School Climate and Discipline Work Group and the Office of Parent Engagement and Communication, and to be involved in a meeting regarding federal relief funds later this week.

“They feel like we represent a really important constituency,” Rodrigues said. “We were very clear with them. We’re not here just to be disseminating information from [the department]. We need to be informing policy.”

The department’s invitation to the organization to be part of its “kitchen cabinet” follows accusations that the have had greater access to the secretary and the administration than other interest groups. The National Parents Union represents groups that have largely blamed unions for slowing down the reopening process and say schools have failed their children during the pandemic. Parent organizations were not represented during Cardona’s March 24 reopening summit, and in early April, Rodrigues said she was “furious” that the department had not yet reached out to any groups within the network. With states facing a June 7 deadline to submit plans to the department for spending American Rescue Plan funds, some of those local groups now want to have more say in how districts spend that money.

“States are looking at revisiting what it means to have families engaged,” Cardona said at the Education Writers Association’s annual conference. “This pandemic taught us that we have to be nimble, we have to be flexible and we have to meet families where they are.”

As part of his “Help is Here” tour to local schools, mostly in the Northeast, the secretary has interacted with some parents who don’t represent particular advocacy groups. And Rodrigues said her group is directing the department to other organizations “doing important work.”

Rachel Thomas, a spokeswoman for the education department, said working with parents is “critical” to addressing academic inequities made worse by the pandemic.

“It’s with parents’ partnership that we can build our education system back better than it was before, and make sure our schools are welcoming environments that work for all students, not just some,” she said.

In his comments to reporters, Cardona added that it’s important to ensure the relief funds are used for students that were the most negatively impacted during school closures.

The National Parents Union is working with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington to create “a checklist” that families can use to track how districts are using relief funds. The materials are expected to be released next week.

“The questions are oriented around whether students are getting the individualized supports they need and whether parents are getting individualized information about their child’s progress,” said Robin Lake, director of the center.

Rodrigues suggested many of the local groups that have been advocating for reopening schools will now become “watchdogs” to track the funding.

“It’s safe to say that until the pandemic, many parents never really gave much thought to how the school system operated, or how they used their funds,” said Christy Hudson, a member of Open Fairfax County Schools, a parents’ group in Virginia. With the relief funds, she added, “it’s more than likely that parents are going to stay involved, and keep an eye on the school systems.”

Founded in early 2020, the National Parent Union receives funding from reform-oriented and pro-charter foundations. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the group has polled parents monthly on topics such as school reopening, parents’ preferences for in-person or remote learning, and how prepared they think their children are for the next grade level.

The organization’s most show 58 percent of parents want both in-person and remote options this fall — an issue where Cardona’s expectations and parents’ preferences are likely to diverge.

Some districts and state leaders say they plan to limit or eliminate this fall, and Cardona said he doesn’t want “a system where students who were underserved in the past select remote learning, because they don’t feel that that school is welcoming or safe for them.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and The City Fund provide financial support to the National Parents Union and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.