'Am I doing the right thing for students?' COVID-19 surges weighing on schools and teachers

In the past few weeks, parents of school-aged children have all had the same experience of getting their kids ready for school. You grab their backpack, their lunch, a snack and, for the third year in a row, you grab their mask. 

The COVID-19 variant omicron is twice as contagious as the delta variant and at least four times as contagious as the first strain we experienced in March 2020. Currently, the omicron variant has resulted in the highest number of COVID-19 cases Arizona has seen in months. 

This has some parents nervous about their K-12 children returning to class in 2022. But schools that don’t return in person run the risk of losing school funding.

In this week's episode of The Gaggle, an Arizona politics podcast, hosts Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Ron Hansen talk with Yana Kunichoff. She is the k-12 education reporter at the Arizona Republic.

She joins the podcast to dive into what is going on within Arizona’s public school system about the coronavirus, how schools are staying open and what that could mean for parents and students moving forward.

Later in the episode, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez talks with Mark Joranstaad, executive director of the Arizona Schools Administration, for a look on in the inside of the operation.

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