It has nothing to do with the "Muh Freedums!" crowd. It's too much work for the teachers. Every teacher I know, which is quite a few in Austin, hated the hybrid system last year. Just in my small circle of friends I know 3 that quit and changed careers over with the hybrid system as the last straw. It's not a matter of simply putting a camera in the back of the room to record while they taught in-person like normal. That was deemed by the facebook mom nazis to be unfair to poor little Keegan at home as his education wasn't equal in terms of quality to little Brysen's at school. So the teachers had to make sure they got facetime in front of the camera and basically taught everything twice, once to the kids in class and once to the kids at home all in the same amount of time. It was twice the work in the same amount of time for the same shitty pay. As a result, Austin is currently short by 140 teachers. Asking them to do that again is going to result in a mutiny of educators and a mass exodus in the career. The only option for doing virtual is to hire more teachers just to do nothing but virtual. But how do you plan for that, not knowing how many kids will be out in a given week or what grades those kids are going to be in? And how do you hire more teachers for that when you are already 140 short of real teachers in classrooms?
If my kids have to quarantine this year I'm chalking it up to tough shit... it sucks but it can't suck much more than the virtual option already did last year anyway.