The vaccine is more widely available now than during the last school year, and is now required for school personnel statewide. But “what’s different,” Sharkey said, “is, the virus is more contagious, we’ve got more people in the schools, so it’s worse in terms of exposure, but the testing program actually got scaled down,” Sharkey said. “They’ve kept the same number of contact tracers, despite the fact that the number of students went up by a factor of six. … It’s been a disaster.”
