ATLANTA -- A few weeks into the new school year, growing numbers of U.S. districts have halted in-person learning or switched to hybrid models because of rapidly mounting coronavirus infections.
More than 80 school districts or charter networks have closed or delayed in-person classes for at least one school in more than a dozen states. Others have sent home certain grade levels or asked half their students to stay home on hybrid schedules.
The setbacks in mostly small, rural districts that were among the first to return dampen hopes for a sustained, widespread return to classrooms after two years of schooling disrupted by the pandemic.
In Georgia, where in-person classes are on hold in more than 20 districts that started the school year without mask requirements, some superintendents say the virus appeared to be spreading in schools before they sent students home.
"We just couldn't manage it with that much staff out, having to cover classes and the spread so rapid," said Eddie Morris, superintendent of the 1,050-student Johnson County district in Georgia. With 40% of students in quarantine or isolation, the district last week shifted to online instruction until Sept. 13.
More than 1 of every 100 school-age children have tested positive for covid-19 in the past two weeks in Georgia, according to state health data published Friday. Children age 5 to 17 who live there are currently more likely to test positive than adults.
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Around the country, some schools are starting the year later than planned. One district in Oregon pushed back the start of classes by a week after several employees were exposed to an infected teacher during training.
Before the latest surge, hopes were high that schools nationwide could approach normalcy, moving beyond the stops and starts of remote learning that interfered with some parents' jobs and hurt many students' academic performances.
Most epidemiologists say they still believe that in-person school can be conducted safely, and that it's important considering the academic, social and emotional damage to students since the pandemic slammed into American schools in March 2020.
In some cases, experts say, the reversals reflect a careless approach among districts that acted as if the pandemic were basically over.
"People should realize it's not over. It's a real problem, a real public health issue," said Dr. Tina Tan, a Northwestern University medical professor who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Infectious Diseases. "You have to do everything to prevent the spread of covid in the school."
Tan and others say that means not just masks but a push for vaccination, social distancing, ventilation and other precautions, providing multiple layers of protection.
Dairean Dowling-Aguirre's 8-year-old son was less than two weeks into the school year when he and other third graders were sent home last week in Cottonwood, Ariz.
The boy took classes online last year and was overjoyed when his parents said he could attend in-person. But Dowling-Aguirre said she grew more anxious as infections climbed. Masks were optional in her son's class, and she said fewer than 20% of students were wearing them.
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Then she got a call from the principal saying her son had been exposed and had to stay home at least a week. Of particular concern was that her parents watch her son after school and her mother has multiple sclerosis.
"It's definitely a big worry about how it's going to go from here on in and how the school's going to handle it," she said.
In Georgia, more than 68,000 students -- more than 4% of the state's 1.7 million in public schools -- are affected by shutdowns so far. Many superintendents said they already have recorded more cases and quarantines than during all of last year, when most rural districts held in-person classes for most students.
"This year, you saw it very quickly," said Jim Thompson, superintendent in Screven County, Ga. "Kids in the same classroom, you'd have two or three in that classroom."
Thompson said the county's 25-bed hospital warned that it was being overloaded by infections, but what led him to send the district's 2,150 students home was concern that he wouldn't be able to staff classes.
"You don't want to start the school day and find you don't have enough teachers," Thompson said.
The onslaught is driving changes in mask policies. Weeks before school started, only a handful of large districts covering fewer than a quarter of students across Georgia were requiring face coverings. Now mandates cover more than half of students.
Part of the policy change is driven by a shift in U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, which now says that when everyone is wearing masks, exposed students 3 feet or more apart don't have to be sent home if they're not showing symptoms.
Angela Williams, superintendent in Burke County, Ga., said she believes masks and that rule will allow her 4,200-student district near Augusta to avoid further disruptions after its current two-week shutdown.
"That is going to cut down on the number of students we're having to quarantine," she said.
Georgia told districts in early August that they could choose their own quarantine policy, and some loosened rules.
Thompson, though, said Screven is likely to retighten its policy when it returns and require everyone who is exposed to quarantine for at least a week because of delta's high contagion level.
"We started with utilizing that latitude to its fullest," Thompson said. "That did not work for us locally."
Some districts are also looking to boost vaccination rates among staff and eligible students, but most Southern schools appear unlikely to mandate teacher vaccination or testing, unlike states on the West Coast and in the Northeast. Thompson said he sought to schedule a vaccine clinic in Screven County last week but got so few takers that it was canceled.
Despite disruptions, there's still strong resistance to masks. In the 28,000-student Columbia County in suburban Augusta, officials said they were putting Plexiglas dividers back up in cafeterias, as well as limiting field trips, assemblies and classroom group work. But the district continues to only "strongly recommend" masks.
Even some districts that have sent all their students home don't expect to require masks when they return, facing opposition from parents and the school board.
"They wanted that that should be the parents' decision," Morris said of School Board members.
MISSOURI LAWSUIT
In Missouri, Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit Tuesday that seeks to stop school districts from enforcing mask mandates.
The action drew a rebuke from President Joe Biden, who finds such lawsuits "unacceptable," his press secretary said.
The lawsuit names Columbia Public Schools along with the district's Board of Education and board members, but it's a class-action lawsuit that "would apply to school districts across the state that have a mask mandate for schoolchildren," said Chris Nuelle, a spokesman for Schmitt.
The new school year began Monday in several districts across the state, and with the delta variant causing a big spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, more than four dozen districts are requiring students, teachers and staff members to wear face coverings. The lawsuit filed by Schmitt, a Republican, cites the low death rate among school-age children.
"We filed this suit today because we fundamentally don't believe in forced masking, rather that parents and families should have the power to make decisions on masks, based on science and facts," Schmitt said in a news release.
Biden believes lawsuits such as Schmitt's put more children at risk, press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.
"The president thinks that's completely unacceptable and he has asked his secretary of education ... to use all of his authority to help those school districts doing the right thing to ensure every one of their students has access to a fundamental right of safe in-person learning," Psaki said.
Columbia School District spokeswoman Michelle Baumstark said the district is "extremely disappointed" that Schmidt filed the lawsuit. She said the mask mandate is "not a forever decision" but is currently necessary to keep students safe.
"The decision to file suit against a public school district after a local decision is made in the interest of safety and keeping students in school will waste taxpayer dollars and resources, which are better spent investing in our students. Columbia Public Schools intends to aggressively defend its decision to keep its community and its scholars safe."
Missouri House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Democrat, said in a statement that schools may be forced to close if Schmitt's lawsuit succeeds and outbreaks occur.
CALIFORNIA REPORT
In California, unvaccinated people in Los Angeles County were five times as likely to get infected and 29 times as likely to be hospitalized as people who were fully immunized, newly released data from California shows.
It's the latest evidence that vaccines continue to significantly reduce the risk of severe illness despite the spread of the delta variant.
The report, published Tuesday by the CDC, also demonstrates the limits of vaccines. They are not an impenetrable barrier; some inoculated people are continuing to develop covid-19.
Vaccine effectiveness has dropped as the delta variant has spread. On May 1, the report said, people who had not been immunized were more than eight times as likely to be infected as people who were fully vaccinated. That was before delta took hold, and on July 25, the ratio had dropped to about a fivefold greater risk.
But the vast majority of breakthrough cases among vaccinated people do not require hospitalization.
"Prior to delta, it did indeed appear that the vaccines were also very good at protecting against infection overall," said Paul Simon, chief science officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Health. "But when delta emerged, there was a big change, because delta is so much more infectious. The vaccine didn't protect as well against infection."
The Los Angeles research joins a rising stack of studies that offer a mixed message about where the United States stands in its long battle. Vaccinated people who had hoped they would be free of concern have been sobered by evidence that breakthrough infections are more common than before the arrival of delta. At the same time, there has been little erosion in protection against severe illness and death.
"The vaccines are doing exactly what they promised us they'd do -- they are keeping us from getting sick and dying, but with the delta variant, we are seeing more transmission than we saw with the alpha variant," Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles health department, said this month.
Still, some vaccinated people in Los Angeles have died. In the May 1-July 25 span covered by the new report, 176 unvaccinated patients, 24 fully vaccinated patients and seven partially vaccinated patients died. Of the fully vaccinated patients, six were immunocompromised, and their median age -- 78 -- was higher than the median age of the unvaccinated people, which was 63.
The great majority of new infections still occur in people who have not been immunized.
S.C. BAN CHALLENGED
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing disability-rights groups and parents of children with disabilities, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday over a South Carolina law that bans school districts from requiring masks, arguing the ban excludes vulnerable students from public schools.
The plaintiffs allege that the ban disproportionately affects students with underlying health conditions or disabilities who are at risk of getting seriously ill if they contract covid-19.
South Carolina legislators in June passed legislation saying school districts can't use state funding to require masks. But some districts and cities have disregarded that and gone forward with implementing school mask mandates.
The ban on mandates is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, the plaintiffs allege.
"By making schools a dangerous place for these students with disabilities, they are essentially forcing their parents to choose between their child's education and their child's health," said Susan Mizner, director of the ACLU's Disability Rights Project. "And that is going to exclude them from their public education."
Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Amy, Jim Salter and Annie Ma of The Associated Press; and by Joel Achenbach, Fenit Nirappil and Lena H. Sun of The Washington Post.