Talk about a false start!

Remember when you were a kid, and you'd (a) go back to school in late August, and (b) it was really depressing to be done with summer vacation, then (c) you'd get used to it, but then (d) you'd get Labor Day off and that would kind of reset everything for another week?

This kind of feels like that:

Two school districts in eastern Kentucky have canceled in-person classes this week after a rise in illnesses including Covid-19, respiratory viruses and strep among its students and staff, according to local officials.

The Lee County School District, which enrolls just under 900 students, reported an 82% decrease in attendance last Friday, which it attributed to illnesses including flu and colds, Superintendent Earl Ray Shuler said. …

Magoffin County Schools, which has approximately 1,800 students, has seen its student attendance plummet from 95% last week to 83% on Wednesday, Magoffin County Schools Superintendent Chris Meadows told CNN by phone.

With numbers like that there's pretty much only one thing the superintendents can do:

Honestly when I first saw these headlines I thought it was a small repeat of the indefensible insanity of early 2020: School officials just shutting things down "out of an abundance of caution" or "to stop the spread" or whatever.

But of course this is a bit different. You can't keep your school district open at 83% attendance. If your kids and staff are out sick at those rates, you can't really maintain a functioning system. You just gotta pull the plug for a bit.

The kids will be back next week. They're doing "remote work" for the remainder of this week, which as we all know is little more than a joke.

So in the meantime the students of Lee and Magoffin counties — the ones that aren't down and out with strep, anyway — are enjoying one last final burst of summer:

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