Will We Still Have Masks in Schools in 2022?

What is the off-ramp here?

My children, a fourth grader and a second grader, have one month left in the fourth semester of school during a pandemic. For adults, the pandemic feels like it has been going on forever, but it’s still a very small percentage of our lives. But for kids, in many ways this has been their lives. My younger son Wynn is seven years old, and he has been in school, not counting pre-K, for two-and-a-half years. Out of the five semesters that he has been a student, four of them have been touched by the pandemic. He got that first semester in kindergarten: The second was stopped halfway through by the beginning of the pandemic, the two semesters of first grade were almost entirely virtual and the first semester of this second grade has featured positive tests in his class, quarantines and vigilant masking of teachers, students and staff. My son hasn’t seen his teacher’s face in more than two years. This is what school is to him, and always has been. That has to have some sort of effect.

I am grateful for the protocols my school system here in Athens, Georgia, have put in place. After the nightmare that was virtual schooling, universal masking, social distancing and regular quarantining of close contacts have allowed my kids to get back to school in person, where they belong: Where they can have an actual…