Parents around the country are breathing a sigh of relief: After nearly two years, most students are no longer forced to wear masks. With the omicron variant waning, parents are increasingly confident that their children will have undisrupted in-person learning for the rest of the school year.

It’s tempting just to accept this return to normal and let concerns about what’s happening at our students’ schools become another COVID-19 relic, like 6-foot social distancing and plexiglass barriers between tables in restaurants. Busy parents have enough to worry about. We never wanted to add complaining to our school boards and our elected representatives to our to-do lists.