There is a “COVID test supply crisis” that will impact Michigan schools, said Linda Vail, health officer for Central Michigan’s Ingham County, on Wednesday. The state is working to supply testing kits to schools in the highest-risk communities where COVID is most rampant, she . States from Florida to Washington have .

Last week, the Biden administration announced that it was “” on its commitment to keeping schools operating safely in person by providing an additional 10 million monthly COVID test to K-12 institutions nationwide — 5 million rapid and 5 million PCR.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed “test-to-stay” protocols that allow students and staff who may have been exposed to COVID to remain in school buildings, provided they test negative for the virus before walking through the front doors. 

But where testing supplies dwindle, it can cause in school operations.

Most schools across the country have managed to stay open in the three weeks since winter break. But an average of more than have been disrupted by brief closures or pivots to virtual learning as they navigated high caseloads and staff shortages, according to the K-12 data service Burbio.

Last week, over 980,000 new youth COVID cases were reported nationwide, according to the , the largest weekly total to date and nearly quadruple the highest tally previous to Omicron. 

To help weather the current surge, The 74 spoke with White House Senior Education Policy Advisor Mary Wall who explained how schools can make use of the newly available testing resources.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Testing in schools is such a key issue right now during the Omicron surge and some officials are saying that they might run out of supply soon. What is your message to school leaders on how to access testing?

Mary Wall: Sure. We’ve really made a lot of efforts to make sure that schools have everything they need to reopen and remain open safely and testing has been central to that effort. It was the core investments that this administration made, starting with the American Rescue Plan, that really helped to make sure that schools could be ready for this moment. 

Across the country there are many, many schools who are implementing testing right now and building on the existing testing programs that they already established. We know that schools are kind of coming at this from a lot of different places and a lot of different levels of experience, so we want to make sure it’s easy for everyone to access both the tests as well as [strategies for] implementing testing in school. 

The biggest headline is the $10 billion that we invested in the (ELC) program at the CDC. That gave $10 billion to states to set up testing programs for schools and we have seen significant movement from states doing just that. 

We’re building on that with the new announcement of the 5 million rapid antigen tests, as well as the expansion of capacity through to reach another 5 million [through PCR testing] with lab capacity each month.

So that $10 billion investment, those 5 million rapid tests and 5 million PCR tests, those are big numbers. I’m curious, what are the mechanics going on here? And what might some school leaders not understand that could be keeping them from accessing tests that are available to them?

Testing can be a challenging endeavor for schools, and schools have been asked to do a lot over the course of the pandemic. We’ve seen it as our charge to make it as easy as possible for schools to tap into resources. 

With the news we announced last week, we have put out steps for schools to take right away. The first and foremost would be tapping into the state’s existing testing initiatives. Every state has something set up for K-12 COVID-19 testing and it varies by state how exactly it looks. But we have created a resource on the CDC website that is basically a that the school can go onto right now and click to learn more about what their state is doing for K-12 testing. That page will lead them to how to get involved in their state’s program. 

If they want to make use of the 5 million antigen tests that we are now offering, those are usually requested by state health departments. And they are … submitting requests to the CDC for those (based on local need). But testing resources fueled by the $10 billion in ELC funds, those are available right now and schools can tap into those right away. 

Operation Expanded Testing, which is the free lab-based (PCR) testing capacity that we offer as the federal government, that is also available and open for service right now. Schools can go online to the , click on the link for the regional hub, and they can begin the process right away … and can get started in as few as seven days after that.

We also want to remind all schools that they are able to also connect to other testing providers that operate in their state and use their ESSR [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] dollars. So there’s $132 billion distributed through the American Rescue Plan for states and school districts. Testing is an allowable use of funds and we’ve seen many school districts [use] that funding stream to set up customized programs in their schools — and that’s been in large districts and in small districts. 

That’s fantastic. And after the announcement last Wednesday, what kind of responses did the U.S. Department of Education receive from K-12 leaders?

We’ve been getting a lot of interesting and exciting responses on testing. It kind of falls into a couple different categories.

One is, we’ve gotten a lot of really eager and positive feedback from districts who have already been doing testing. … Those [school systems] have really been eager to take this to the next level. I know there have been districts who are doing weekly screening, for instance, and are excited to expand that into a test-to-stay a program. There’s others who have been doing diagnostic testing and decided, we really want to expand the screening tests we’re doing in our schools to be on a weekly basis to cover more kids and this new investment is going to help enable that.

We’ve also heard from many districts who have not done testing and said that they’re eager to tap into it. They know that the current surge has really seen significant increases for caseloads, including with kids, and they want to make sure they can use this as a key line of defense in their school buildings. And so for them, you know, [our role has] been how can we help you set up testing successfully in your building. We’ve gotten started on this right away by offering technical assistance and support to school districts. 

We’re offering more this week, we’re going to offer it every week for the next several weeks to make sure that no matter where you are in your testing journey, that if you’re a school who is interested in implementing testing that you’re able to do so. That you not only have the resources to do so in terms of tests, but that you also know how to use them effectively in your building.

Some people would say that the most recent expansion of K-12 testing is a great effort, but that it came too late to help schools respond nimbly to the Omicron surge. [Though of course, there might be subsequent surges.] I’m wondering what your response is there.

I disagree with that assessment. I think that we have made clear our commitment to keeping schools open safely. We’ve made that commitment clear through the American Rescue Plan, which provided $130 billion for K-12 schools through the Department of [Education] and $10 billion for K-12 COVID-19 testing. We’ve seen states take that money and set up testing approaches starting back in April of last year. So we are eager to build on that investment. And we saw across the country that schools who were already implementing testing strategies have been able to use it in this current surge very effectively.

And last question here. Clearly, the White House has put itself on the frontline of this testing shortage in schools. I’m curious whether the Department of Education also sees itself as responsible for helping to remedy the staffing shortages that many schools have been facing recently?

As an administration, we see the staffing issues that are occurring, and we take them very seriously. 

We passed the American Rescue Plan specifically with the purpose of making sure that we could have more staff in school buildings, both to accommodate mitigation strategies like social distancing, but also to make sure that schools have all the people on hand that they need to make sure that students can come back safely and have their needs met after this completely unprecedented time. 

First and foremost, we would want to remind school districts and states that they have that $130 billion to spend on additional staff, to retain the staff they have, to pay the staff they have more money, and really make sure that whatever personnel needs they have in response to pandemic can be met. 

We’ve also really tried to make clear that there are existing flexibilities, either in ways that you approach retirees or others who were previously teachers, ways that you can hire bus drivers, creative uses of bringing more staff into buildings to make sure that we can meet the staffing needs of the school.

In December and January, his 8,900-student district just north of Atlanta partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study classroom virus transmission, ultimately adjusting their distancing protocols to reduce spread. In September, after reading an written by a Harvard University professor that proposed using rapid antigen tests to give healthy kids an alternative to quarantine, he reached out directly to the author asking about the model — and ultimately implemented the “” scheme in his schools. Now, the district is planning to hold for students this month as COVID shots roll out for younger kids.

But despite a keen eye for the latest coronavirus safety research, Rivera made another move in mid-October that many parents had clamored for, but health experts cautioned against: He lifted Marietta’s mask requirement.

“​​We tried to get to a solution that we think is good for our community,” the superintendent told The 74. “Could I give kids a bit more sense of normalcy back that they haven’t had for two years? I think that’s a question we’re grappling with.” 

The move typifies a trend emerging nationwide, as school leaders respond to .

At least a dozen districts that previously required face coverings are now mask-optional, including ; and . Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 135 now have mask mandates — down from 150 on Oct. 1 and lower than at any point this school year since mid-August, according to , a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

That pattern worries Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

Over the summer, the health expert used simulation modeling technology to predict how many positive COVID cases would be transmitted in schools, depending on their vaccination rates and mitigation measures. The that he and his team published in August recommended that schools drop universal face-covering rules only once 80 percent of students and staff are fully immunized and community transmission is below 10 cases per 100,000 people. 

Currently, the U.S. averages . And while as many as , of eligible youth have received both shots.

Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 are expected to roll out in days and as many as with children in the age group plan to have their kids immunized, according to surveys, but a significant share before doing so, they say. About a quarter said they definitely would not vaccinate their children.

With vaccination rates as they currently stand, school buildings are largely full of people unprotected against the virus, Linas pointed out.

“That is a setup for trouble in the future, having ongoing smoldering transmission because people are under vaccinated and we’re not wearing masks,” he told The 74. “The virus continues, new variants emerge — those threats are real.”

Other experts, including Joseph Allen, the Harvard public health professor that Rivera corresponded with about Marietta’s test-and-stay approach, argue that schools should take a more dynamic approach to masking requirements, dropping them when transmission falls. Given the current situation, he advocates for the end of all school face-covering requirements by January, if not sooner.

“If things change for the worse — and they might — then we just pull the masks back out of the drawer. But we must be just as willing to put them away when things look better,” Allen wrote in an October .

At the state level, Massachusetts has set a benchmark that aligns with the Linas’s recommendation, for any school that reaches 80 percent student and staff vaccination. But new guidance in allows schools to scrap face coverings where community transmission is low and gives districts the option to do the same if they maintain stringent quarantine rules. Neither policy accounts for immunization levels in the school community.

Georgia, similarly, is a state that gives local school leaders the power to set their own coronavirus safety policies. In Marietta, the district’s program for testing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus played into the calculus for Rivera’s decision to go mask-optional.

“There’s an interplay between these approaches,” the superintendent said. “Your approach to masks will impact the distance at which you are identifying close contacts — three feet vs. six feet, indoors. The number of students who are identified as close contacts, that drives your test-and-stay demand.” 

Because 98 percent of would-be quarantines in his district never ultimately tested positive, Rivera hoped the testing policy, which the district has funded partially through relief dollars, would keep students learning in the classroom, regardless of whether they were wearing masks. 

Out of 281 tests so far administered by the program, 271 have come back negative, the superintendent said — meaning those students have been able to stay in the school building.

The “test-to-stay” strategy has been this fall and is lauded by public health experts. The CDC said in mid-October that they are considering into their school coronavirus guidance.

Regarding masking, the CDC recommends universal use, but in practice, the policies have been much more controversial, with eruptions over the mandates in dozens of districts. 

“I felt like I’ve had to navigate this path by myself,” said Rivera. “I feel like most people sit on either side of it. Either it’s, ‘Nope, we have to follow blindly what the CDC says,’ or we pretend that COVID doesn’t exist. And I don’t think either one of those is right, there’s a balance in the middle.”

The softened masking rules have had some real benefits, according to teachers in the district. Foreign language classes, for instance, were strained when everyone had to cover up.

“It is really tough when kids are learning a new language for the first time to pronounce new sounds, not seeing how to form their mouth, or [seeing] my mouth because I’m covered up in a mask,” Wendy Locke, a French teacher at Marietta High School, told The 74.

Barbie Esquijarosa, who teaches English to non-native speakers at the high school, agrees that face coverings make school more difficult for young people learning English. But she also worries that the mask-optional policy presents an added stressor for the students she teaches, many of whom may live with older relatives and lack health insurance.

“They come in concerned,” said Esquijarosa. “They’re wearing [the mask] the whole time. They’ll stay away from the kids who don’t wear the masks.”

What’s more, many of her students lack transportation, meaning they aren’t able to participate in Marietta’s test-and-stay program if they have possible COVID exposures.

Rivera recognizes that the program is accessible only to students with transportation and is working to designate a bus to pick up kids for COVID testing. But as of yet, no such route is in operation. Like many other districts across the country, Marietta’s bus driver reserves are amid wider facing schools and the U.S. economy.

Elsewhere, some school districts have taken an opposite stance on masking. When the department of health in Douglas County, Colorado moved to remove face-covering mandates, the school district sued on behalf of nine medically vulnerable students — winning a on the new rule.

“No parent should be forced to choose between sending their child to school and risking their child’s health, and no family should have to fear that their child may face life-threatening illness just to access their right to a great education,” Superintendent Corey Wise said in a statement.

Back in Marietta, there has been no increase in coronavirus infections since Rivera dropped universal masking rules. Total infections have fallen from 233 in the first five weeks of schools to 143 in the seven weeks that followed, according to the district.

Still, Linas, the Boston University medical expert, cautions against the mask-optional policy. 

Breathing room now for students and staff may mean breathing room for the virus — to mutate and evolve — in the long run, he said.

“It just doesn’t make sense to start rolling those dice when we’re so close to the actual finish line.”

Whether schools can roll tests out effectively — and get cooperation from those who screen positive for the virus — remains to be seen.

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The promise of quicker, more accurate results could bring a welcome reprieve for school districts across the country that are sending large groups of students home with suspected COVID exposure. Last month, six days into the school year in Florida’s Palm Beach County, one in 50 students was . In California, state guidelines call for unvaccinated students who are “close contacts” of a person with a positive COVID test to , forcing thousands of students too young to get a vaccine to miss critical days of in-person instruction.

While the tests’ use in schools has only recently begun to rise, the technology has been in development, in many cases, for more than a year. One of the new tests, developed by , is available through a network of nationwide and counts the National Basketball Association among its users. Another test, developed at , has been championed by New Jersey , who last year called it a potential “game-changer.”

In the K-12 world, the saliva test with arguably the most traction is one developed by the University of Illinois — it is in use by about 45 percent of the state’s 3,859 K-12 schools, covering more than 877,000 students, the university . School health officials elsewhere, including and Washington, D.C., are also piloting it, with more districts likely to follow.

The field will likely get a huge boost after President Biden last week nearly $2 billion for schools, community health centers, and food banks to buy about 300 million rapid tests. Biden said he’d use the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacturing of rapid tests, including those that families can use at home.

‘A very promising platform’

Researchers developed the Illinois test in June 2020, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted for the so-called covidSHIELD test in February. One reason researchers say saliva tests is that virus found in the saliva is more likely to have passed into patients’ lungs, where it can do serious damage. Viral load in saliva, they say, is also significantly higher in patients with known COVID-19 risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

Because the new saliva tests are polymerase chain reaction or PCR tests, they can detect both the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, as well as fragments of the virus after a test subject is no longer infected.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, a University of Illinois infectious disease epidemiologist, developed the studies that earned their test its emergency authorization. She said PCR tests are not only reliable, but very sensitive. And they’re better early-warning indicators of infection.

“Our data show that saliva is one of the best ways to find people early because the virus replicates in saliva before it moves to the nasal tissues,” she said.

But saliva tests aren’t without controversy. In one case earlier this year, the FDA warned that a saliva swab test developed by the California startup ​​Curative some later-stage infections. It said Curative’s tests should only be used on people who showed COVID symptoms within the prior two weeks.

In January, health agencies in Colorado, citing concerns over false negatives, said they the Curative tests. Other purveyors have tried to distance themselves from these results.

Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious diseases physician and head of ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center, said he’d research with a small sample of patients on the Yale test, as well as a for other saliva tests. Research on the Yale test, he said, found that saliva in the samples was as accurate as nasal swabs. And the meta-analysis, he said, “showed basically the same thing for various saliva testing approaches including the one developed at Yale.”

But he cautioned that he hadn’t seen detailed analyses of “how well the saliva technology performs in people with mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.”

And the Yale sample was small — just nine patients. How well the test performs in larger groups “is still an open question.” But he said it’s “a very promising platform” and he’s looking forward to seeing more data.

Lower cost, faster turnaround

Pinpointing exactly how many K-12 schools regularly test students for COVID-19 is difficult, but a few indicators suggest that testing isn’t widespread. A recent found that the largest group of schools implementing testing last fall were using rapid tests mostly for symptomatic students and staff, “since they often lacked enough tests to conduct screening testing.” Private schools were more likely to be conducting routine screenings, they found. One survey noted that about 20 percent of private K-12 schools conducted regular screenings at school.

The Illinois test costs just $20 to $30 per dose, a fraction of the typical $100 cost for a standard nasal swab test, according to SHIELD Illinois, the nonprofit that manages testing in the state. The organization is making it available for free to districts across the state, mostly thanks to in federal COVID test funding for schools.

Beth Heller, a spokesperson for , said the organization operates seven labs statewide, which cuts test turnaround time from as much as three days to less than one, on average.

A shorter turnaround time matters, especially now: With the earlier COVID-19 variants, Smith said, about 30 percent of infections happened before subjects showed symptoms. “With Delta, it’s more like 75 percent.”

In Baltimore, where school health officials have been using the Illinois-developed test since March, weekly saliva testing has “made parents feel comfortable sending their children back” to school, said James Dendinger, interim director of COVID testing.

In most of the district’s middle and high schools, students now submit to weekly saliva tests. In most elementary schools, health officials test classroom groups with nasal swabs. If any group of swabs delivers a positive result, they test each student again. Only those who test positive or who had close contact with those who test positive must quarantine.

These protocols kept Baltimore’s positivity rate extremely low last spring: from March 1 to June 15, it was 0.6 percent in middle schools and high schools, and less than 0.3 percent in pre-K-8 schools.

The new tests also bring a certain comfort factor, Illinois’ Smith said. “It’s a lot easier to than to have a swab stuck up your nose, especially if you’re going to be testing regularly.”

Laura Wand, an advisor for SHIELD T3, the for-profit that administers the tests outside of Illinois, said that ease allows users to make testing part of their routine. “The key to containing the virus is to be able to test often, isolate, and track,” she said. “And the gold standard for testing often is everybody, twice a week. Now, people are not going to do a nasal swab twice a week.”

For the SHIELD test, subjects let saliva pool in their mouth and simply raise a small funnel to their lips, then “let the saliva fall out, push it out with your tongue,” Smith said. “Once people get the hang of it, most people can complete the process in one to two minutes.”

One drawback: Test subjects can’t have anything in their mouth for at least an hour before the test, “which requires planning and logistics,” especially in K-12 schools. Students can’t eat or drink, chew gum, use mouthwash, or brush their teeth for at least an hour prior to the test. For adults, that means no smoking or chewing tobacco either.

Smith said the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the system’s flagship campus, relied on the test for the entire academic year, at least for the more than 35,000 students attending class in person. “We did have some outbreaks, but they came in back under control,” she said.

The biggest one came early, between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15, 2020, as students returned to campus. In early September, the university even imposed a brief lockdown, The New York Times , after an unexpectedly high number of students with positive results continued to socialize and attend parties. One official called the phenomenon “willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” and top officials circulated a , saying the irresponsible students “have created the very real possibility of ending an in-person semester for all of us.”

The letter concluded, “We stay together. Or we go home.”

Behind the scenes, though, the university was testing so often, Smith said, that “we didn’t have to have a long-term lockdown” like .

Willful noncompliance notwithstanding, the university’s seven-day average positivity rate never rose above 1.21 percent, according to data on its .

Once the twice-weekly testing got underway, Smith said, this “just brought everything back under control. We saw outbreaks within dorms or within apartment buildings, and we would increase the frequency of testing to every other day. And within a week we would bring the case numbers in that location down to zero.”

SHIELD Illinois’ Heller said the testing regimen has allowed Champaign County, where the flagship campus is located, to keep its COVID positivity rate under 1 percent since September 2020. Elsewhere in Illinois, she said, positivity rates jumped as high as 12 percent last fall. Nationwide, positivity rates climbed to about .

The state health department in August said it would for free to any school district outside of Chicago that wanted it (The city receives a separate federal funding stream that other districts don’t.) The department also said schools could use it to take advantage of a so-called “Test-to-Stay” protocol, rather than quarantine.

Under the protocol, students and teachers who have close contact with someone who tests positive can stay in school if they agree to be tested four times: one, three, five, and seven days after exposure. If their tests remain negative, they don’t have to quarantine.

Quick results bring ‘an extra layer of comfort’

One of the first public school systems to take up the SHIELD tests was the tiny Hillside District 93, a pre-K-through-8 district in Cook County, about 20 minutes west of Chicago.

Superintendent Kevin Suchinski said the quick test “allowed us to make sure that we kept our doors open” and avoid shutting down, even as other districts took to control outbreaks.

And as in many areas, COVID cases there are rising — last week, the average daily new case count per 100,000 people, but the county’s infection rate remains among the lowest statewide.

The ease of testing students’ saliva, he said, meant “we were testing early-childhood kids all the way up to 8th grade,” ages 3 to 13. The quick results, even with asymptomatic students, “gave us an extra layer of comfort to say, ‘Is it spreading within our community? Is it spreading within our school?’ And we could then react.”

Suchinski made the tests voluntary for students and staff, but the ease of testing and the district’s 0.5 percent positivity rate encouraged more people, including students’ family members, to submit to it. In August, the district was testing 55 to 60 percent of families.

“Nothing’s 100 percent,” he said. “We cannot guarantee that we’re going to stop [COVID]. We’re not going to stop cases. What we’re going to do is prevent the spread.”

When Texas schools returned to in-person education last fall, the spread of the coronavirus “gradually but substantially accelerated,” leading to at least 43,000 additional cases and 800 additional deaths statewide, according to a study released last month.

The was done by University of Kentucky researchers for the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and tracked weekly average COVID-19 cases in the eight weeks before and eight weeks after the state’s school districts sent students back to school in the fall.

The researchers said the additional cases they tracked after students began returning to schools represented 12% of the state’s total cases during the eight weeks after reopening and 17% of deaths.

They analyzed three things: school district reopening plans in every county, COVID-19 cases and deaths, and cellphone data that showed how adult movement changed once a community’s children went back to in-person learning.

Researchers chose Texas because, by the fall term, most schools around the country were still closed as Texas and a handful of other states were reopening in “less-than-ideal circumstances,” said Aaron Yelowitz, an economics professor at the University of Kentucky and one of the study’s researchers. The state also provided good conditions for pre-vaccine study, he added, since data was collected from May 2020 until January of this year, when vaccine rollout was still slow.

Although more Texans have since been vaccinated — about 30% had been fully vaccinated as of Saturday — Yelowitz said there are still communities in which the study’s findings could matter moving forward, like areas with more vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-resistant people.

Across the state and the rest of the country, school reopening plans divided many communities last year. Proponents of reopening schools said in-person schooling would improve learning, increase social interaction, and allow access to state services like special education and free and reduced-price lunch programs. Opponents said remote learning was safer and did not risk the lives of teachers, faculty and staff, particularly after an intense summer surge.

Last July, state leaders, including Gov. , gave individual school districts authority to make reopening decisions, even when they went against the recommendations of public health authorities. The Texas Education Agency required districts to make on-campus attendance an option, stating that districts also had to let students study remotely.

When Abbott ended Texas’ mask mandate in March, he said public schools should operate under TEA’s eventual guidance. At the end of March, TEA released guidelines requiring face masks in school buildings, with some exceptions, which included students younger than 10 or those eating or exercising.

More than 60% of school districts opened schools at or near their typical date for the fall term, despite the state’s summer surge of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research report. The researchers estimated that more than 90% of Texas school districts opened without any staggered attendance plans, compared with more than 40% nationally; the study found that roughly 60% of Texas districts had 80% or more of their students enrolled in-person by the end of September 2020.

Although otherwise healthy children are generally less likely to contract and transmit COVID-19, adults can still contract the virus from their students and co-workers at school. The study’s results could be explained both by direct school spread and by the movement of adults returning to work and school, the researchers wrote.

“Reopening schools in a world where there wasn’t a vaccine at the time did cost lives, did cause infections, though probably did have some positive effects for the kids who were able to attend in person, rather than virtually,” Yelowitz told The Texas Tribune.

Out of the approximately 3.8 million students, teachers and staff on Texas public school campuses this school year, TEA spokesperson Frank Ward said just more than 5% reported confirmed COVID-19 cases. Ward said the state stands by its commitment to offering in-person instruction and remote learning choices.

“Texas schools have mitigated the worst of these issues for many students by remaining open for all students who chose to attend this school year,” he wrote in an email, “and we stand firmly by our decision as a state to offer options for our students and their families at a time when many students across the country did not have those options.”

Texas State Teachers Association President Ovidia Molina said she is worried about upcoming summer classes and another fall return. Last fall, she said, teachers reported inconsistent mask usage and expired cleaning supplies.

TSTA continues to push for requiring everyone to wear a mask in schools because it’s still hard to know who is vaccinated, she said.

Although in-person attendance is valuable for students because of its learning and relationship benefits, Molina said many educators and staff members have died of COVID-19, and the trauma that losing a teacher brings to students and co-workers is important to consider.

“It’s just this sense of urgency that we know we have and we feel, and we want others to have as well,” Molina said.

Marissa Martinez is a reporting fellow , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Disclosure: The Texas State Teachers Association has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .