How many students that got sick are experiencing symptoms more severe than the common cold? It seems like the chaos is caused by the attempted solutions to covid and not the actual symptoms? Edit: 7 day rolling average of COVID cases according to https://www1.nyc.gov/ is 32k cases per day with 38 deaths. So there is a 0.1% mortality rate.
You could make a case for putting up a plexiglass wall between students and teachers just to end this headache and I think you wouldn’t find as much opposition now as you would have in 2020.
That said, some kids have to be physically restrained/handled and you can’t very well do that behind plexiglass.