Yeah, I keep telling myself it’s too soon to know what the situation will be so not to spend time thinking about it yet. Aug 18th is our first day of school, though, so at what point do I start thinking about it? We’re in the “a leading reservation gets you an ADR” period now! 
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That’s my DS9’s first day of school as well. My 12 year olds start the 19th. But, yeah, there’s no point in worrying about it now.
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Oh man, I can 100% empathize with you, b/c I have 2 older vaccinated kids plus DD9. Hugs. My DD9 just heard, again, that she can’t do something. I promised her that when she’s vaccinated I will take her to do several things with only her and I, so that she can “catch up.” And I’m going to make them BIGGGGGG things. I don’t know what yet, but I’m a liner, so she’s going to have a ball.
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I 100% agree with you about the masks in the required schools. I am unsure what will happen with DD9 in the fall. I know that her school system is reopening at 5 days per week, but they said something about a virtual option being available for the under 6th graders. I just wonder what that actually means. I wouldn’t want to commit her to being virtual for a long period of time if she can get vaccinated within 2 months of starting school (I’m hoping for the Sept start to vaccination).
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So far, other than visiting my grandmother, he hasn’t missed out on anything. But he knows that we have the freedom not to wear masks in certain places while he doesn’t. At least it is summer, so school isn’t involved at this point.
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Our school district would try to move kids between virtual and in person at the end of the marking periods if parents wanted to switch.
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I was thinking today about how the country has moved on (and forward) except for those of us who remain concerned about the virus and have children under 12. It is hard for the kids and hard for us as parents. I don’t begrudge the families with vaccinated kids getting out there (I’m happy for them) … I only wish we could safely be out there too.
Our district has said the same. DD6 was remote all year, but we are planning on her being back to in-person school this fall. I really hope masks are required until all kids are given the opportunity to be vaccinated.
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This. A lot could happen between now and August. Some good, some bad.
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I think my kids will be back to in-person, full time with masks in September. That’s how it is now and things are getting back to normal here, but masks will be necessary until all students can get the vaccine.
We’ll be a good case study in whether an area with a high rate of vaccinations can withstand variants. Our town has one of the highest percentage of vaccinations in a highly-vaccinated state.
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Here in NJ, there’s no remote option for next year, which I’m personally ok with bc my kid has been in person since October of 2020. It will be in person full time.
We’ll see what shakes out regarding masks. Where I live in the state, there’s a growing anti mask in schools sentiment, and it’s our governors election cycle coming up. Things could get interesting.
For the record, I’m 100% fine with masks being required. We are all vaccinated except my 6 year old, and when the mask requirement was dropped for the vaccinated, we vaccinated people stopped wearing masks. Three of us now have a head cold. 
I’m leaning towards team masks forever now, lol. It’s been a great year of not getting sick.
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I’m in NJ as well. A lot can happen between now and September but the plan is definitely full time, in person. It’s so much better for the kids, but I was all in on remote when the numbers were ugly. I am optimistic, especially with our vaccine numbers.
I hear you about not being sick. Allergies have been awful this year though, because it’s always something.
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True. My six year old got sent home bc they thought he had pink eye… It was just his allergies, and that’s WITH the Claritin.
I was supportive of remote learning in Spring 2020 and the extended holidays in fall and winter to provide a buffer for potential spread from travel and family gatherings. But I’m glad my kids have been mostly in person in 2020-2021 and I am glad we live in a district that will keep going in-person into the next school year.
Our school district removed the mask mandate in early May, which I thought was a few weeks too early at the time, but with numbers of cases / deaths as low as they are now, and vaccination rates being relatively robust, I have no reservations whatsoever about sending my under-12 (unvaccinated) kids to school without masks. The risks to kids that age are already quite low, and with the risk of transmission also being low, it’s way down on my list of worries.
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I just can’t believe that it’s almost time for my solo staycation…been dreaming about that for 15 months…I will be…(dramatic flourish)… ALONE! (smile). 15 months is a long time for an extreme introvert to be imprisoned with 4 other people in the house.
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Have a marvelous time! 
Confession: DH started going back into the office full time on Monday. He had been going to the office in the mornings and then working from home in the afternoons. (And evenings. And weekends.) I do miss having him around, but there’s definitely a part of me that’s reveling in the alone time. It’s peaceful! It’s quiet! There’s no one to interrupt me until the kids are home after school! Well, except for me interrupting myself as I wander over to this forum. I can feel my stress levels going down with this blessed extra solitude.
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The New York Times had a good piece on the risks of Covid for unvaccinated children, which echoes some of the same points I have made before in this thread. I’m sharing it below in its entirety.
The Morning
By David Leonhardt
Good morning. How should Delta change the way parents think about Covid?
A park in El Paso this week.Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
The unvaccinated
For most American adults, the Covid-19 situation is now straightforward. Vaccine shots are widely available, and once you’ve had one, Covid no longer needs to dominate your life. You are unlikely to contract any form of the virus and are virtually guaranteed not to suffer serious symptoms.
You can socialize with friends, indoors or outdoors. You don’t need to wear a mask to protect yourself or others. For you, Covid has come to resemble a mild flu that you are unlikely to get.
For children under 12, however, the situation is more complicated. They are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine. And with the spread of the Delta variant of the virus, many parents are understandably anxious. Over the past week, I’ve received emails and social media messages from some of those parents, asking for help in thinking about Delta. I will try to provide it today.
How bad is Delta?
As each new coronavirus variant has emerged, people have feared that it would be a game-changer — resistant to the vaccines or vastly more serious. So far, though, all the variants have been much more similar to the original version of the virus than they have been different.
The vaccines are effective on all of them, and many of the early fears about severity of variant symptoms have not been borne out. That’s why some public-health experts use the term “scariants.”
Delta does appear to be worse than most, as I described in Monday’s newsletter. It may be the worst variant yet, in terms of contagiousness and severity. Yet it also seems to be in the same broad range as the earlier ones.
Consider this data from England, where Delta is already widespread. Covid-related hospitalizations of children have risen from their lows of a few weeks ago, but the increases are not large:
By The New York Times Source: National Health Service in England
The best assumption seems to be that Delta will be modestly worse for children than earlier versions of the virus. “I haven’t seen data to make me particularly worried about Delta in kids,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, told me.
Covid vs. car trips
This evidence suggests that serious versions of Covid will continue to be extremely rare in children.
As you can see here, some common activities — and several other diseases — have caused significantly more childhood deaths than Covid has:
By The New York Times Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The same is true for infants:
By The New York Times Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Death is not the only outcome that parents fear, of course. Yet “long Covid” and hospitalization have also been very rare in children. It’s just that society has been so focused on Covid that we have paid intense attention to the risks associated with it — even when they are smaller than other risks that we unthinkingly accept.
To take one example, we don’t use the phrase “long flu,” but it’s a real problem, including for children: One academic study has found that up to 10 percent of people who contract influenza later develop cardiac inflammation.
Serious forms of Covid are so rare in children that a few countries with better recent Covid track records than the U.S. — like Britain, Germany and Israel — may not even officially urge vaccinations for most children. The decision will be up to individual parents.
It’s true that children will face a higher risk of contracting Covid once they resume activities than they would on lockdown. The good news is that rates of Covid transmission in the U.S. have plummeted, which makes every activity safer than it would have been this past fall or winter.
Some basic principles
Different parents will make different decisions, and that’s only natural. Here are a few guiding principles:
- The interruption of school and other normal activities has caused substantial damage to children — academically, socially and psychologically. Helping children resume normal activities is important to their health. “Kids should be in camp,” Dr. Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at N.Y.U., told me.
- There are still enough Covid uncertainties that some precautions can make sense for children, like wearing masks indoors or avoiding crowded places. “The actual overall threat of death is minuscule, and the threat to health is quite low,” Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, said, “but if I had young kids, I’d still really prefer they not get Covid.”
- The riskiest areas are those with the lowest vaccination rates, which tend to be in the Southeast and the Mountain West. “If I were living in a place where cases were rising, I’d be more worried that my children could contract Covid,” Nuzzo said.
- Polls suggest that many Democratic voters have an inflated sense of Covid’s risks to children. If you’re liberal, you may want to ask yourself if you fall into this category. (If you’re conservative, you may want to encourage more of your friends to get vaccinated.)
- The biggest risk to your child’s health today almost certainly is not Covid. It’s more likely to be an activity that you have long decided is acceptable — like swimming, riding a bicycle or traveling in a car.
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Great article, and I hope many with young, unvaccinated children read it and are comforted by this in relation to Covid (though I guess they now should be worried about homicide…yikes!). Thanks for posting!
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I have been so much more conscious of risk and dangers lately! I was driving on the road last week and almost got in an accident when someone tried to merge into me when getting on the freeway. The thought crossed my mind, “why do I have to drive to work every day when I could work from home like I did for the last year!” 
Anyway, I think it will take time for all of us to recalibrate our risk tolerance.
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[emphasis added]
And there-in lies the rub. Not feeling much support for this at all and it’s considered a “basic principle” for the article. Good luck getting under 12s to stay masked at school or camp or whatnot if other kids don’t and the adults running the place aren’t promoting it.
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That actually happened to my husband on the I 10 when we lived there. Car pushed him into another car trying to force a merge and our car was totaled. Scary!
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