Public schools are opening this month in Texas, just as the delta variant of COVID-19 is spreading, rapidly filling emergency beds in hospitals around the state and putting emergency care back into the overcrowded and strained predicament it was in at the beginning of the year.
This surge in hospitalizations and cases caught the schools and many others by surprise. Parents and educators were hoping to get students back into classrooms. The education they get in person is markedly and measurably better than what those students get virtually on computers at home. And those same parents and educators were hoping to use the return of in-person classes to catch up for the class time lost since the closing of schools in spring 2020.
But a nasty and fast-spreading delta variant of COVID-19 is advancing aggressively, and parents and educators are trying to sort it out as the school year begins.
