I agree with Ms. Calleja at the AG office that school closures in the last year and a half have been harmful to children. However, she should be careful in where she places the blame. Public health policies enacted across the state in which benign or isolated symptoms are treated as possible covid infections are the real cause of students missing out on so much school. Moreover, children are at the lowest risk of hospitalization and death from covid than all other age groups by many orders of magnitude (see https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalization-network and https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics). And even vaccinated individuals are contracting and spreading covid because the vaccines do not prevent transmission.  So requiring vaccination would not actually stop covid from spreading. Virginians should be allowed to weigh the risks for themselves and not lose their jobs if they choose to forgo vaccination. A final note on parents of schoolchildren: parents and not the government reserve the right to make decisions about their children' health.