A Code Enforcement Officer gives a student a high five as parents, city officials, teachers and others welcome students back for the first day of school at Shannon Elementary School, Aug. 5, 2021, in Shannon, Miss. Nearly 5,000 children, educators and school staff are quarantined in Mississippi after returning to classrooms at the start of the new school year, some under mask-optional policies. The 69 outbreaks reported between Aug. 2 to Aug. 6, which was the second week of school for some districts, resulted in nearly 1,000 children and 300 teachers and staff testing positive for COVID-19, according to a weekly report from Mississippi's Department of Health.

While many school districts adopted a mask mandate for the beginning of the school year, it was not universal throughout the state, despite pleading from the Mississippi State Medical Association last week for all districts to require students and staff to wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. The highly contagious delta variant is ripping through Mississippi, which also has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, more than quadrupling case numbers since June and causing a deficit of ICU beds.

The state's early start to the new school year is providing a grim bellwether for school districts set to return more than 50 million students to classrooms over the next few weeks, many under mask-optional policies. In southern Mississippi, Lamar County School District shuttered two of its schools during the last week in July and returned students to virtual learning until Aug. 16 after a week-long staggered reopening resulted in one high school identifying six cases among staff and 41 cases among students, forcing the quarantine of roughly 100 people. Highlighting just how contagious the delta variant is, after one week of in-person learning last year, the school district recorded only five cases among staff and five among students.

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