School Disruptions: Omicron Upends Return to School in U.S. (Published 2022) (2024)

After a fall semester of relative normalcy across much of the United States, Covid-19 made itself felt on Monday in school districts nationwide.

A vast majority of U.S. public schools appeared to be operating as planned this week, including those in New York City, the country’s largest district. But the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant, along with labor and testing shortages, has led to a growing number of educational disruptions.

Districts in Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Newark were among those announcing that their schools would switch to remote learning for periods lasting from a few days to several weeks.

Many schools do not have enough coronavirus tests, and principals have reported large numbers of teachers and other employees calling in sick, either because they are infected with the virus or other illnesses, are caring for sick family members, or are fearful of the conditions within school buildings.

The building closures appeared to be concentrated — at least for now — in regions, such as the Northeast and upper Midwest, where Democratic policymakers and powerful teachers’ unions have taken a more cautious approach to operating schools throughout the pandemic.

Unions, politicians and educators now all say they want schools to remain open. But there are fears that Omicron may push many more districts to close, at least temporarily.

Large city school systems in Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and Newark have joined a growing list of public schools across the country that have postponed reopening after the holiday break, switched to remote instruction, or have taken both steps because of Covid-19 outbreaks and staffing shortages.

Some of the announcements came abruptly, as school leaders struggled to respond to a rapidly changing situation.

• On Sunday night, the 75,000-student Milwaukee Public Schools system said it would temporarily switch to remote instruction beginning Tuesday, citing “an influx of reported positive Covid-19 cases among district staff.” The system said it hoped to resume in-person instruction on Jan. 10.

• School officials in Madison, Wis., a district of 27,000 students, delayed the start of classes until Thursday and said they would be held online until Jan. 10.

• The Detroit school system, citing what officials called a record high test positivity rate of 36 percent in the city, has announced that no school would be held Monday through Wednesday, with more information to follow later in the week. The school system said on Friday that it would test its staff early this week and would distribute laptop computers to students, a sign that more remote learning could be in store.

• Elsewhere in Michigan, schools in Pontiac will be remote until Jan. 18, and in Ann Arbor through Jan. 10.

• In Ohio, Cleveland’s public schools, with 35,000 students, were scheduled to be remote this week following an announcement last week by Eric S. Gordon, the school chief. Schools in Lorain and several other northern Ohio districts also were moving to remote instruction.

• Arthur Culver, the superintendent of schools in East St. Louis, Ill., a 5,200-student district, said in a Facebook post on Friday that classes would begin remotely on Tuesday, citing “very high Covid-19 positivity rates over the winter break within our serving ZIP codes.” The district planned to remain remote through Jan. 14.

• The 35,000-student Newark schools announced last week that they would shift to remote learning for at least the next two weeks, returning to classrooms on Jan. 18. It is the largest of several New Jersey school systems moving to remote instruction, including Irvington, Cranford and South Orange-Maplewood (until Jan. 10) and Paterson (until Jan. 18).

Some school systems that are open for in-person instruction this week have nonetheless had to shut some school buildings for lack of staff, including eight schools in Columbus, Ohio, and 12 in Pittsburgh.

CHICAGO — With coronavirus cases in Chicago soaring to their highest levels of the pandemic, public school students returned to classrooms on Monday. Whether they will still be there at midweek remains an open question.

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union were preparing to vote on whether to work remotely starting on Wednesday, with or without the district’s blessing. The union, which has repeatedly clashed with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration, had demanded that every student be tested for the virus before returning from winter break, a step the district did not take.

At a news conference on Monday, the union’s vice president, Stacy Davis Gates, expressed her anger at having “to continuously fight for the basic necessities, the basic mitigations.”

Instead of universal testing, the district gave tens of thousands of students optional take-home tests before winter break. On Monday, it became clear that the testing effort to ensure a safe reopening had largely failed. Of 35,590 tests recorded by the district in the week ending Saturday, 24,843 had invalid results. Among the minority of tests that did produce results, 18 percent were positive.

A district official said test vendors were looking into the reasons for the inconclusive results.

Even as cases and hospitalizations around Chicago have risen, school leaders have been steadfast in their belief that classrooms should stay open. Pedro Martinez, the district’s chief executive, said in an interview last week that he could not support closing all schools at a time when the rest of the city remained open for business. Instead, Mr. Martinez said it made more sense to make decisions about reverting to online teaching on a classroom-by-classroom basis as outbreaks emerged.

Chicago Public Schools officials said on Monday that they were concerned about the union’s planned vote on switching to online instruction. If union members decided to pause in-person teaching, it was not clear whether the district would authorize that remote instruction or lock educators out.

The dispute has left parents — both those who want their students in the classroom, and those who would have preferred to start the semester online — with little clarity on how the school year will unfold.

“All of that uncertainty and chaos just really makes everything harder,” said Cassie Creswell, who leads a state-level education advocacy group in Illinois and who has a daughter at a public high school in Chicago. Ms. Creswell said she would have preferred that the district start the semester online.

Ismael El-Amin, who has children at two Chicago schools, including one where he serves on the Local School Council, said his family was “definitely in a reactive mode” as he waited to see what disruptions might emerge. Mr. El-Amin said his family had skipped large Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with family in order to limit potential exposure to the virus.

Mr. El-Amin said he had become more worried about how the constant upheaval might affect his daughters, who are vaccinated.

“That fear is kind of transformed from the medical worst-case scenario to, this is going to be another month, another semester where my daughter’s going to miss out on consistent education, getting to know her friends, getting to know her teachers,” Mr. El-Amin said.

ATLANTA — Days after announcing that classes for K-12 students would be held in person after the holiday break, officials with Atlanta Public Schools reversed their decision, saying on Saturday that classes would be online only during the first week of the year.

The decision came “after further review of district and community Covid-19 data,” a statement from the district said. Nearby Clayton, DeKalb, Fulton and Rockdale Counties have also pushed back the return to in-person classes because of high infection rates in those areas.

On Friday, the Georgia Department of Health reported more than 24,000 cases of Covid-19 in the state. As of Sunday, the state had a seven-day average of 14,343 cases per day, according to a New York Times database. That is a spike of more than 700 percent over two weeks.

The Atlanta school district recorded its second highest weekly count of positive cases for the school year during the final week of the fall semester, with 306 students and 129 employees testing positive. The highest positivity rate was in August when 520 people were sick.

Students who needed laptops and other devices for virtual classes were encouraged to pick them up at their schools on Monday. Those who needed meal kits could pick them up at one of eight schools across the city.

Atlanta Public Schools staff members were required to go to work on Monday for mandatory Covid testing unless they were sick.

“The data collected from staff testing will be used for future planning,” the district’s statement on Saturday said.

Students are expected to return to in-person classes on Jan. 10.

WASHINGTON — The federal government released new recommendations last month for unvaccinated students exposed to the coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said those students could remain in school, as long as they are tested for the virus twice in the week after exposure and both tests come back negative.

The latest guidance, known as the “test-to-stay” protocol, aims to minimize disruptions to learning as two highly contagious variants of the virus, Delta and Omicron, spread across the country, causing some school closures and threatening to upend the strategies that federal and state officials adopted to return to in-person classes in the fall.

Although some schools and districts are already using the test-to-stay approach, the C.D.C. had not previously endorsed it, citing a lack of evidence. Last month, the agency released studies from two counties, one in California and the other in Illinois, that effectively tested the protocol and found that it worked.

The studies were conducted before the fast-moving Omicron variant began spreading in the United States. Scientists are still investigating many basic questions about the variant, including whether it increases the risk of in-school transmission.

The new policy, hinted at in the winter Covid-19 plan that President Biden unveiled last month, still calls on students to wear masks and socially distance, and applies only to those who remain asymptomatic. Until now, unvaccinated students were expected to quarantine at home for as long as two weeks after exposure. Some states have had tens of thousands of students in quarantine.

Vaccinated students with exposures have generally been allowed to remain in school as long as they are asymptomatic and wear a mask.

Mayor Eric Adams insisted on Monday morning that New York City’s schools would stay open despite an extraordinary surge in Omicron cases. But about a third of city parents did not send their children back to classrooms on the first day after the holiday break. Attendance was just over 67 percent, slightly higher than the low point of 65 percent the system reached on the day before winter break.

Throughout the day on Monday, Adams was adamant that the system would remain open. He repeated the message in a series of television interviews and after his first official school visit since taking office on New Year’s Day.

“We’re really excited about the opening of our schools,” Mr. Adams said outside the school, Concourse Village Elementary School in the Bronx. “We want to be extremely clear: the safest place for our children is a school building.”

Mr. Adams said that remote learning had been disastrous for too many of the city’s nearly one million schoolchildren in the nation’s largest school district, and had been particularly harmful for children in low-income neighborhoods and homeless students.

But the calm that Mr. Adams sought to project was not shared by the many parents and educators who greeted Monday morning with profound trepidation. After roughly a year of remarkably low virus transmission in schools, Covid cases soared in the week before the winter break, prompting the closures of 11 schools and over 400 classrooms, and the contact tracing system for city schools effectively collapsed amid the surge.

New York City reported 35,650 new virus cases on Sunday, with a 7-day average test positivity rate of nearly 22 percent, according to state data.

Some families and elected officials have called on Mr. Adams to delay the start of school by a few days to allow every child and educator to get tested. And teachers have raised questions about how schools will be properly staffed with so many teachers sick with the virus or quarantining due to exposures.

“This is an all hands on deck moment,” Mr. Adams said, acknowledging that administrators who are not normally in the classroom would be used to address staff shortages if necessary.

Mr. Adams has endorsed a plan created by former Mayor Bill de Blasio that is designed to keep more classrooms open as the surge continues. The plan calls for distributing 1.5 million rapid at-home test kits to schools.

Starting Monday, the city is also doubling its random in-school testing program to give P.C.R. tests to 20 percent of consenting children in each school weekly. But most families have not opted in to allow their children to be tested, which has made the testing pool very small at some schools.

The mayor and the new schools chancellor, David C. Banks, are betting that their plan to increase testing will prevent major outbreaks.

“We’re going to turn those question marks into an exclamation point: we’re staying open,” Mr. Adams said.

Mr. Adams and Mr. Banks have so far resisted calls to mandate booster shots for educators or vaccines for children. The mayor has said a decision will be made this spring about mandating vaccines for students for the fall.

“We’re not at the point of mandate,” Mr. Adams said Monday, as he encouraged eligible New Yorkers to get vaccinated and boosted.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the city’s teachers’ union, said in an email to members that he had encouraged Mr. Adams to start the year remotely. But on Monday morning, Mr. Mulgrew said he was working closely with the new mayor and that schools had been some of the safest places in the city throughout the pandemic.

Later on Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul reiterated her commitment to keeping New York’s children in schools.

“My view is that every child should be back in school unless they are testing positive,” she said.

The state has distributed 5.2 million at-home test kits to schools thus far, and another 3.8 million arrived yesterday and have yet to be distributed.

Under the current rule, test kits will only be provided to students for known exposures that occur in classrooms, although Ms. Hochul said that policy was under review.

She also cautioned against a return to remote learning. “The teachers did the best they could. The parents did the best they could,” she said. “But we ask too much.”

In particular, she spoke about the effects of remote learning on children in communities of color, those who lacked resources and those without high-speed internet access — an existing digital divide that she said had widened into a “digital canyon.”

“We cannot have that,” Ms. Hochul said. “That was an injustice. We cannot have that anymore.”

As New York City schools opened up after winter break, parents who crowded sidewalks in Brooklyn to pick up their children expressed a mix of anxiety, relief and resignation about students returning to classrooms amid a rise in coronavirus cases.

Mirta Desir, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, biked to P.S. 250 George H. Lindsay in Williamsburg to pick up her third-grade daughter from the first day back. Ms. Desir, a filmmaker, said she hoped her daughter’s school was taking the necessary precautions to protect all the children from the coronavirus. She said her daughter was fully vaccinated, but added that can only do so much in keeping everyone safe.

“I think the new mayor said something along the lines of school is now safer,” she said. “I don’t think it’s safer. But I think them going to school is as safe as her staying at home with me because I have to go to work and I have to be outside and she’s in contact with me.”

Ms. Desir said being a working parent and helping her daughter during the remote learning phase of the pandemic was a “tight balancing act” that she’ll ultimately support if schools shut down again.

“At the end of the day, it’s about the health and safety of the kids,” she said. “I would love if all the adults got vaccinated to mitigate anything for them. But if that’s not the case, then parents have to make the right decisions that they feel is best for their family.”

Jamie Arriaga, of Williamsburg, said it was “nerve-racking” to send her first-grade son back to school at P.S. 250.

Ms. Arriaga said she did not want him to go back with coronavirus cases rising, but that as a single parent she also couldn’t afford to take time off to help him with remote learning.

“It’s just like you’re just damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t,” she said. “I don’t want him in school if it’s going to be crazy. So it’s just a headache every day.”

Ms. Arriaga said the decision to ramp up testing in schools didn’t ease any of her concerns. She’s vaccinated against the coronavirus, but has no plans to vaccinate her son.

“Everything is so confusing,” she said. “You don’t know if schools are doing the best that they can. I’m confused every day and I have to just figure it out.”

Ruben Lopez, of Williamsburg, was also at P.S. 250 to pick up his daughter. He said he didn’t want to send her back to school, but had no other choice as he doesn’t fully support remote learning.

“At home is good, but it’s not the same. I don’t think it is as effective,” he said, comparing remote learning with in-person classes. “So sending them back was scary, but it was good at the same time.”

Mr. Lopez said knowing how exuberant children can be, he was afraid of his daughter being exposed.

“Kids are going to be kids,” he said. “You can’t control the virus amongst kids.”

Jenny Vogel, of Bushwick, waited outside of Brooklyn Arbor Elementary School in Williamsburg to pick up her two children. Ms. Vogel, an art professor, said she didn’t have any anxieties around sending her children back to school because they are vaccinated. She felt it was important for schools to stay open so parents can work, but she will ultimately support whatever measures will keep all children safe.

“Remote learning was tough on me, working from home and doing that and doing my own work,” she said. “But I understand if cases go up too much then it needs to happen, and we’ll roll with the recommendations of the city.”

In the Mid-Atlantic region, school reopening plans that were not disrupted by the Omicron variant were thrown aside by a massive winter storm.

Schools in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania that were scheduled to open on Monday stayed shut because of the weather.

Concerns about the virus and Covid-related staffing shortages forced officials to announce remote learning at dozens of schools in Pittsburgh and Columbus, while the chief executive of Cleveland schools announced last week that the whole district would be remote for the first week back.

But everywhere, it seemed, things were changing not only by the day but by the hour.

The Philadelphia school district said in a Jan. 1 message posted on its website that with “extensive mitigation measures and safety protocols,” schools would be welcoming students back in person on Jan. 4. Among those measures, the district announced that in a change to protocol, students or staff members who did not comply with school mask requirements would be sent home.

The local teachers union, however, reported that nearly 1,100 of its 13,000 members had tested positive over the winter break. The president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, Jerry T. Jordan, urged the superintendent to institute “a seven day pause on the return to in-person learning,” during which the district could strengthen its mitigation protocols.

But as of Monday afternoon, the city seemed committed to the school district’s original plan, with the health commissioner saying in a statement that “in-person learning is critical to the well-being of our children.”

Outside of Philadelphia, in the Central Bucks School district, where a debate over school Covid-19 policies consumed school board meetings and dominated the school board elections in November, the first day back was postponed by “staffing shortages associated with the Omicron-related spike in Covid-19 cases.”

In a letter sent out on Sunday, the superintendent announced that staff members would be absent “across every school and operating division within our district,” and that there were not enough substitutes available to fill in.

“My first reaction is that I’m not surprised,” said Karen Smith, a Central Bucks board member who noted in vexation that a majority of the board voted last month to end a school mask requirement. “It’s all immensely frustrating. Just tiring and overwhelming.”

Across the South, most public schools started the new year on time and in person on Monday, though some instituted new requirements to try to curb the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.

New Orleans students returned to school on Monday as planned, with a requirement that students and staff wear masks on school grounds, indoors and outdoors. And as of Feb. 1, all students ages 5 and older will be required to be vaccinated, though families can opt out under certain circ*mstances.

“This is one more measure to make sure that we can continue to preserve in-person learning,” said Henderson Lewis Jr., the superintendent for the district, at a news conference on Monday.

Some smaller districts in Louisiana, including Concordia Parish Public Schools and Natchitoches Parish Schools, also reinstated mask mandates for the start of the semester.

In South Carolina, Greenville County Schools, which serve more than 75,000 students, resumed in-person on Monday. On Friday, the district adjusted its requirements for isolating and quarantining students and staff. Notably, the isolation period for students who test positive for Covid-19 but are asymptomatic, was reduced from 10 to five days. Students are required to wear a mask for days 6 through 10 when they return to school.

In Alabama, several school districts announced mask mandates for the start of the new semester. They included Madison County, which includes the city of Huntsville, as well as Talladega City and Pike County.

Macon County and the city of Sylacauga, which each serve some 2,000 students, said over the weekend that the first week of school would be virtual.

“Considering the surge right here in our community following the holiday gatherings, this is the reasonable course of action to protect our students and teachers from exposure,” said Michele Eller, the superintendent for the Sylacauga district, on Sunday.

Ms. Eller acknowledged the challenge that canceling in-person classes could present to families but said with classes beginning on Wednesday, families have a few days to pick up tools necessary for virtual lessons.

In the metro Jackson and Pine Belt areas of Mississippi, classes were expected to return, in person, on Tuesday. Existing Covid-19 precautions, including mandatory masking, will remain in place.

DALLAS — Most districts in Texas plan to return to classes as usual this week, so far avoiding the disruptions in schools across the United States because of Omicron.

Some districts are adjusting their Covid policies in response to the surge. The state forbids school districts from requiring that students and teachers wear masks or be vaccinated, but many school districts have defied the ban on mask mandates.

Cases in the country’s second-most populous state have more than doubled in the last two weeks, and hospitalizations have also risen sharply. But its case rate of 43 per 100,000 residents remains far below the national average for now, and serious illness among children remains rare.

In most districts, children will return to in-person instruction this week, after a holiday break in which cases numbers of the milder Omicron variant skyrocketed. Here is what different districts are doing:

• In Dallas, where children are set to return to classes on Wednesday, the district announced that it would extend its mask mandate through spring break in March. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa announced in December that the mandate would likely expire after in January, but when the county raised its transmission risk level from orange to red at the end of December, he reassessed.

• Children returned to school on Monday in the state’s largest district, the Houston Independent School District. Schools are keeping the mask mandate in place and also started offering free Covid testing for students and staff.

• In Fort Worth, students will return on Wednesday. Masks are “strongly encouraged” but not required, and the district conducts contact tracing if students or staff are diagnosed, which is not required by the state.

• The San Antonio Independent School District added an extra week of break for most students. The idea is to mitigate a post-holiday bump in cases, and provide a week of extra instruction for students who need it, said Laura Short, a spokeswoman for the district. Student are expected to return on Jan. 11.

• Lancaster ISD, in the Dallas area, which planned to return to in-person learning on Tuesday, announced on Friday that it will move to virtual learning at least through the end of this week. “Until this pandemic is under control, the possibility that there will be a need to shift to online learning again remains constant,” the district told families in an announcement.

The recent spike in Covid cases in Michigan forced several school districts to move classes online, or cancel them altogether, this week.

In Detroit, the state’s largest school district, families were told on Dec. 31 that classes would be canceled, with no remote option, from Monday to Wednesday, to ensure all of its nearly 8,000 employees get tested before classes start again.

Citing record infection rates in the city, the superintendent, Nikolai P. Vitti, said that voluntary testing last week of employees revealed an infection rate of 20 percent.

Detroit, and the rest of Wayne County, reported more cases in December than ever before, according to The New York Times’s coronavirus tracker. The county has reported a daily average of 2,675 cases, an increase of 108 percent over the past two weeks.

The district hasn’t announced plans for Thursday and Friday, but it has opened free coronavirus testing sites at 10 of its schools in the meantime. After Detroit shut down its schools at the beginning of the pandemic, it extended the closures until January 2021. Many other schools had already reopened. And last month, the entire district went remote every Friday.

Lorenzo Spencer, whose son is a freshman at Cass Technical High School, in Detroit, said he isn’t surprised by the announcement. His son’s school already follows a hybrid model, where students show up a few days out of the week.

“There’s no playbook for what we’re going through,” Mr. Spencer said. “As long as they’re doing what they can do to stay safe, I’m all for it.”

In Ann Arbor, the schools superintendent announced that classrooms are closed until Jan. 10. The switch to virtual learning, Jeanice K. Swift, the superintendent, said, will let the district monitor cases in the area and account for how many of its employees called in sick.

Some parents in Ann Arbor aren’t entirely on board.

“I don’t think shutting school is the answer to Covid,” Stephanie McCartney, whose son attends kindergarten at Haisley Elementary School, said. “I think it would be better if they were in school.”

Elsewhere in Michigan, schools in Pontiac are remote until Jan. 18, while schools in Southfield are remote until Jan. 10.

SACRAMENTO — With the Omicron variant raging across California, millions of schoolchildren returned to classrooms on Monday, ending the holiday break as many had spent it — masked, distanced, apprehensive and in long lines with their parents, scrambling for coronavirus tests.

Few schools were closed in a state whose Covid-19 precautions have been among the most aggressive in the nation. California has managed to maintain comparatively low rates of virus-related deaths and hospitalizations.

But infections have soared recently because of the highly contagious variant, which appears to result in less severe cases. In hundreds of districts, in-person instruction was conditioned on heightened health requirements and fraught with the understanding that even those might not prevent a return to remote learning.

“Frankly, the disruption I’m worried about isn’t Day 1 — it’s Day 2, 3 or 4 if we get 30 or 40 or 50 positive cases,” said Alex Cherniss, the superintendent of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, where, after days of impassioned community debate, some 10,000 students in coastal Los Angeles County returned to class on Monday.

“People are exhausted here,” he said.

California’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, was not scheduled to resume classes until next week. But on Monday, the district issued new rules requiring baseline testing as a condition of returning to campus, regardless of vaccination status. Previously, testing had been optional for vaccinated and asymptomatic students and employees.

In many other districts, reopening classrooms on Monday also hinged on fresh rounds of coronavirus testing.

In Marin County, students had been given kits to test for the virus before re-entering campus. In Sacramento County, families stood for hours over the weekend at testing sites hastily erected by school districts or took advantage of an infusion of six million take-home tests the state supplied to districts across California as Omicron was starting to spike.

“We did two tests at home and he’s fine,” Emily Ramey said as she dropped off her younger child at a middle school in suburban Sacramento. “I’m just hoping that everyone else tested, too.”

Los Angeles Unified already conducts the nation’s largest weekly school-based coronavirus testing program, but health officials in the county have ratcheted up other measures that will affect the hundreds of thousands of students and employees in the school system, along with those in private schools and nearly 80 other public school districts.

New health rules starting Jan. 1 mandate, for example, that returning students at all of the county’s districts wear face masks not only indoors but also outside at recess, and that school employees upgrade to medical-grade N95 or KN95 face coverings.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has reiterated that the state is “committed” to keeping classrooms open and promised last month to make home testing kits “available to every K-12 public school student as they head back to the classroom from winter break.”

But not all districts had received their allotment by Monday. San Francisco schools increased mobile testing sites throughout the city and strongly encouraged students to get tested before returning, in part because they will not receive their allotment of tests from the state until later this week.

In Palos Verdes, Mr. Cherniss said concern over Omicron almost prompted the district to delay reopening until next week. But when he announced he was considering it, he said, the outcry from parents was fierce. Eventually, the district opted to reopen as scheduled, but to strongly encourage students to test before returning.

“We did a big push over the weekend,” he said. “We handed out 2,000 home tests in less than three hours and did another 2,000 live tests. More than 100 were positive.”

MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida reiterated on Monday that officials would not allow the state’s public schools to close, despite a major spike in coronavirus cases fueled by the Omicron variant.

“You have worse outcomes by closing schools,” said Mr. DeSantis, a Republican who has increased his national profile by rejecting coronavirus lockdowns and mandates for much of the pandemic. “Kids need to be in school.”

Furthermore, the governor said while speaking in Fort Lauderdale, children “do not need to be doing any crazy mitigation” such as testing or wearing masks, unless their parents want them to. He added: “Just let them be kids.”

In November, Florida legislators heeded the governor’s request to ban mask requirements in public schools. Ahead of Monday, when most classes resumed after the holiday break, some large school districts, including in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, mandated masks for teachers and other adult employees — but not for students.

In a news conference on Monday promoting monoclonal antibody treatments, Mr. DeSantis said public universities would remain open, too. He criticized private institutions that have returned to virtual learning temporarily or required students to shelter in place on campus.

“I think any university that does that should have to refund 100 percent of the tuition to the parents,” he said.

The governor rejected the idea that children should be regularly tested, or that adults should be tested if they do not have Covid-19 symptoms. He said too much testing of people whose clinical outcomes would not change as a result of a positive test was limiting supply.

The state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, said he is drafting guidelines on who should get tested so that fewer people feel the need to do so.

“We’re going to be working to unwind the sort of testing psychology that our federal leadership has managed to unfortunately get most of the country in over the last two years,” Dr. Ladapo said.

That approach is at odds with public health experts who have encouraged the opposite, urging more people to get tested regularly so they can go about their daily lives.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said widely available testing is key to deploying early therapeutic treatments, including the monoclonal antibodies that Mr. DeSantis has promoted. And knowing if a younger, healthy person is infected can help protect an older, more vulnerable person.

“The idea that we don’t care about infections in low-risk people only works if low-risk people never interact with high-risk people,” Dr. Jha said.

In Warwick, R.I., parents of students at Veterans Middle School received a message on Sunday night informing them that classes on Monday would be held remotely because so many teachers had called in sick, many of them with Covid-19.

The high school in Johnston, R.I., opened as expected on Monday morning — only to shut down a few hours later because so many staffers were absent.

Across New England, school districts were improvising the start of the new year, as staff shortages and testing protocols amid the Omicron variant surge challenged their ability to open normally.

Providence, R.I., school officials staggered the return to in-person classes this week, with some students scheduled to be in class on Monday but others not until Tuesday or Wednesday. The idea was to allow time for Covid testing before students returned.

In Arlington, Mass., outside of Boston, officials intended to release students early on Monday and Tuesday and focus on pooled virus testing of staff and students.

Still, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, who greeted students as they arrived at the Saltonstall School in Salem, Mass., on Monday morning, counted it as a success that most of his state’s schools were open for in-person education.

“There was all kinds of talk last week about how school wouldn’t open in Massachusetts today,” he said at a press briefing. “School did. Pretty much across the Commonwealth.”

The state had rejected calls from the Massachusetts Teachers Association to keep schools closed on Monday in order to focus on staff Covid testing.

In Boston, where students were expected back in school on Tuesday morning, the mayor said the city would do all it could to keep schools open for in-person learning but acknowledged that staffing shortages might ultimately create difficulties. Officials said that 155 school district employees had tested positive for Covid over the weekend.

— Felice Belman

WASHINGTON — Local officials in the nation’s capital on Monday pushed back the reopening of public schools by a day because of a snowstorm. Covid-19 tests will now be available for pick-up on Tuesday and Wednesday, they said, and schools in the district will instead reopen in person on Thursday.

City and school officials announced at the end of December that all students and staff would be required to provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test result before returning to school. While schools will start in person, it’s possible that classrooms will have to switch to virtual learning in the coming weeks.

“The health and safety of our community remain paramount as we prepare to welcome students and staff back to our schools,” said Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee in a statement. Covid cases in the district have increased 485 percent in the past two weeks, according to The New York Times’s tracker, with an average rate of 2,103 cases per day. Hospitalizations have increased 60 percent during the same time period.

Talisa Sutton-Stephenson, 36, has four children in public and charter schools in the city, who will be returning to in-person learning on Wednesday and Thursday. Ms. Sutton-Stephenson, who is an educator for the District of Columbia Public Schools, said she was thrilled that her children, who are all fully vaccinated, would be returning to school in person. She was especially happy for her 6-year-old daughter.

“She’s really a different child in person than she is virtually,” said Ms. Sutton-Stephenson, who is also fully vaccinated. “She retains more information. She really does value relationships with her teachers and other students.”

“I cannot see doing virtual again,” said Ms. Sutton-Stephenson. “I really wish that the conversation or the narrative would switch from staying home to, ‘What do you need to do to stay in person safely?’”

Teachers agree that in-person learning is the best choice right now, said Jacqueline Pogue Lyons, the president of the Washington Teachers Union.

“Our teachers are very anxious because we know that the numbers are very high, but we know that the best place for students to be is in person,” said Ms. Pogue Lyons, adding that it was “going to be a long probably month and a half.”

She said she was pleased that the District was one of the few places in the country that would require a negative test from all teachers, students, and staff before returning to school. The school system also plans to offer all teachers K95 masks, and the union is pushing for students to receive those masks too.

A number of other schools in the D.C. metro area have either canceled classes entirely on Monday or switched to virtual learning because of either the snowstorm, Covid-19, or both. Those include Arlington Public Schools, Fairfax County Schools, Montgomery County Public Schools, and Prince George’s County Public Schools.

At least one school district in Ohio went remote this week because of the rise of cases in the state, and it’s unclear when students will go back. Other districts extended winter break by canceling classes altogether on Monday.

In Cleveland, the city’s superintendent, Eric Gordon, announced on Wednesday that classes would be remote this week. But parents can still stop by to pick up their child’s lunch, and the district won’t cancel any sports practices or games scheduled this week.

The district will continue to monitor the virus’s spread, he said, before deciding if students can return on Jan. 10.

More than 2,500 people on average are testing positive daily in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, a 17 percent increase over the last two weeks, according to The New York Times’s coronavirus tracker.

Shari Obrenski, the president of the local teachers union, said that while in-person instruction is preferred, schools are struggling to find enough substitutes as more teachers continue to call in sick.

“You want to be able to provide an education for your students,” she said. “And when you don’t have enough adults to do that, across the multitude of jobs that need to be performed in a school, you’re better off remote.”

Some parents, like Danielle Shipman, said they aren’t concerned about having their children home alone, but are worried about the quality of instruction with remote learning. Her two eldest children, a freshman and a junior at John Marshall High School, in Cleveland, were held back after failing last year.

“My kids can’t learn this way,” she said. “I’m frustrated. I don’t know what else to do.”

Ms. Shipman, who works full time at a nursing home, isn’t able to stay home to make sure they are actually paying attention when they sign onto virtual school.

“This isn’t working,” she said. “And this generation is just screwed at this point. I mean, we can only do so much as parents.”

Waverly City Schools and Springfield Local Schools also extended winter break by canceling class on Monday. And some students at the Reynoldsburg City Schools district transitioned to virtual learning.