Most Parents Want Their Kids Back In The Classroom. Fewer Agree On The COVID-19 Safety Measures.

After more than a year of distance learning, many school-age children in the U.S. have gone back to the classroom. And while the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus certainly triggers mixed feelings about kids’ returning to school, parents have maintained for the most part that they prefer in-person learning, at least some of the time, to the entirely remote, virtual learning that took place largely online during the past school year.

The debate over whether students and educators must adhere to certain safety protocols to make in-person learning possible, though, is just the latest political battle concerning COVID-19. A week ago in Florida, a judge ruled that schools could mandate mask ordinances despite Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s objections. And on Monday, the U.S. Department of Education said it had opened civil rights investigations into five states that banned schools’ mask mandates to examine whether these policies were placing students with disabilities and underlying health conditions at a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19. Recent surveys underscore just how large the divide is among parents over whether students and teachers should have to wear masks or be vaccinated — assuming, in the case of students, that they are old enough to get the jab. Much of that tension, though, may have less to do with how parents identify politically and more to do with whether they’ve been vaccinated.