That’s silly if they required vaccines to return to school.
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Most likely, yes, they were probably infected before school started, possibly at the state fair that was two weeks ago, or just kids (& teachers) being kids (& teachers) over the summer. 
My wife did homeschooling at the end of the spring 2020 semester. for small kids, My take:
•Requires the adult not to work and actually be engaged with the kids all day. Not an option for working parents.
•Dedicated learning space needed. We setup a whole room with giant white board, desks, lots of stuff on the walls (mathy, science, alphabet, schedules, etc).
•Physically and mentally exhausting for the parent. Very easy for school day to only last 4 hours or so.
•Varies by number of kids and age. we had 6 and 7 yr old at the time.
•freedom to choose type of schooling is nice. We effectively did montessori style.
•freedom from strict school schedule and systems easier on the parents
•freedom from strict school schedule and systems causes kids to lose discipline.
•significant lack of social interaction makes K and 1st grade homeschool almost useless. You can only do so much math and reading at a time when school is >50% social skills and being able to be part of a group without being a little shit.
•I enjoyed not having to see other parents for a while.
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Trying to homeschool while also working full time AND trying to keep the household going (meal planning/grocery shopping/not living in filth) does suck. I would have been amazing at homeschooling if I didn’t work full time. Mr aj was home but … that’s a long story for another day.
ETA we did middle school and high school.
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I’ve found the gender neutral “condensplian” to be a useful term.
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Thanks for mansplaining that to us, JFG. 
Salt Lake City schools were under a city issued mask mandate and one of the reports I read talked about how good it seemed to be working. The reporter indicated they had gone to a number of different schools to include elementary, middle and high school and said that from their observation masks were nearly universal. But, of course, YMMV.
It’s almost like some people break rules or something.
Most parents that I know that homeschool actually have “school” for about 4-5 hours each day.
And not “all at once”. Depending on how many kids (and grade level), it’d be 2-3 hours in the morning and 1-2 hours in the afternoon.
Time in between was dedicated to:
- Self-directed learning (e.g., reading or watching educational videos or playing outside)
- Completing an assignment (e.g., set of math problems, “construction” project, etc.)
- Helping with chores around the house.
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My friend didn’t send their kids to school, so they had no school-employed teacher, and no school-provided curriculum. We obviously did have both. But we worked with our elementary school kids on reading, writing, and math skills, using our own “curriculum” in addition to what the school was doing, not just following their curriculum. We were more focused on phonics for reading, for writing we separated the act of writing from the act of composing. (We’d have the kids say out loud what they wanted to write, and then repeat their words back to them for them to write them out.) And the children of an actuary and a mathematician were well beyond the elementary school math curriculum, and we taught them math entirely on our own curriculum.
I don’t say that we “home schooled”, because the kids were in a public school most of the day. But we did spend a lot of time “home schooling” in the early years.
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I am not a long term homeschooler, I am a covid homeschooler. The boys (1st graders) are truly homeschooled. We are lucky that they both read above grade level and don’t have any academic worries. One of the boys is getting accelerated in the math curriculum which is something that would not be available to him at the public school.
Our 3rd grader does not use the school’s virtual program (our district now put under the homeschooling umbrella) which is Edgenuity. It might be fine for credit recovery for high school but it is a painful, clunky, difficult system for elementary kids. At least that was our experience. I think some kids did have success with it though. We are paying for an online private school for our 3rd grader which has a much smoother interface. In addition her public school teacher is keeping us in the loop so that when she returns she will be up to date in her workbooks. In September she starts her “Science is Weird” class which is an interactive real time class where you study a topic for a month from the aerial level down to the molecular level. She loves it. Will it all stick? Maybe not but it is so very cool. So she basically gets school and a half. Maybe school x2? She reads a ton on her own but we read books together too and pull advanced vocabulary through that. She still plays club soccer so she gets interaction with some friends. We’ll see if I can keep them covid free before the vaccine is out. So not entirely sure if you want to call that “homeschooled” or what.
The thing I love most about homeschooling is the speeding up/slowing down as needed. The thing I hate most about homeschooling is the lack of socialization. But the whole point of covid homeschooling is to reduce exposure.
On that note, I was feeling crappy yesterday sinus issues & terrible headache. So I sent off one of my testiowa kits to see if I test positive for covid. If you live in Iowa you can order 10 test kits for free.
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Also we did homeschool but only for half the year last year, once it was evident that there wasn’t a holiday spread we put the kids back in public school.
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This is common in the Charlotte Mason approach, especially when children are younger & still mastering writing mechanics, making writing slower than their brains can think of what they want to say, so CM encourages young ones to dictate their stories to parents.
Your post highlights why parent involvement, whether homeschool, public or private school, is a huge factor in children’s success. 
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It’s not just that writing is slower, but when they are learning to write, the act of writing seems to occupy enough brain power as to make it hard to actively compose.
I remember having this issue twice, myself. Once when i was in high school and broke my dominant hand, and had to write with the other hand. I could form the letters legibly enough, but i couldn’t do that while thinking about what i wanted to say. The second time was when i moved to composing on a keyboard. That took me quite a while to master.
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The service industry has been hit pretty hard with Covid - I wonder if it will eventually leak to teachers/ing. Online schooling is looking more and more probable in the near future.
This is somewhat validating. I played the role of teacher maybe 5 times during that span and I didnt know how my wife was going 6 hours a day.
But then she explained that is like 2-3 hours before lunch, then food/run errand/play outside, back after lunch for 2 hours, then some chores before dinner. Still a long day for her.
wife was doing most of the housework in the AM before school, then making dinner and everything else after school. So she was busy from about 8am to 8pm every day.
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These are weekly new case #’s for my town:
1st week of July: 10 (reported July 7)
Last week of July: 88 (reported July 28)
1st week of August: 233 (reported Aug 4)
Last week of August: 474 (reported Sep 1)
School opened for students August 12. While teachers may have been getting classrooms ready in July, they wouldn’t have officially started until August, so they wouldn’t have had any big meetings until then.
It’s entirely possible, based on my states horrible history of reporting Covid data, that they got behind in counting and caught up that first week of August. They don’t report new cases. They report cumulative totals and I track those to get new cases. They only report at the city/zip level once a week.
This doesn’t look to me like opening schools, even maskless, has caused an increase. It looks to me like our numbers were going up and opening schools didn’t do anything to stop that.
I might have been wrong to worry about opening schools, except to the extent that mr aj interacts with around 150-175 kids a day on his bus in the next town.
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More tests are being done!! THAT’s why there are more cases!!!
–Sturgis government
Yeah only I don’t know this week’s positive % but one week it was like 51%. Also there is anecdotal evidence that it is harder to get tested than it was a year ago. I haven’t had any reason to try, knock wood.
So many COVID threads not sure whereto put this one.
Study that masks due in fact help and that surgical masks were more effective than cloth masks but that both reduced transmission rates.
I’ll see if I can find the actual study and not just the twitter feed with some highlights.
This was a longer article linked within the twitter thread. The Impact of Mask Distribution and Promotion on Mask Uptake and COVID-19 in Bangladesh | Innovations for Poverty Action
And the full paper can be found here https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf
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