After two years of disrupted schooling, most everyone planned for in-person classes and a return to some normalcy. But the highly transmissible Delta variant is complicating those plans as it spreads among unvaccinated children and threatening to disrupt another year of school.

The disruptions this time will not come from state-mandated closures of school districts, but instead from an accumulating number of students who are in quarantine. Students who test positive or are simply exposed at school will have to quarantine for up to 14 days at a time and sometimes longer, depending on the status of their family members.

This is already playing out in parts of the country, with 90,000 students forced into quarantined-imposed remote learning instead of being in class. Just a few weeks into the school year, and a remarkable 15 percent of all Mississippi K-12 students are in quarantine. Other schools will experience similar disruptions when a wave of Delta cases reach their community.

These quarantines disrupt not only in-person learning for students, but also many of the services that schools planned to use to help students catch up academically, such as tutoring. As has been the case throughout the pandemic, these disruptions will likely be borne by some of the most underserved, particularly low-income students and kids of color.

Read the full article about quarantines by John Bailey at The 74.