The reason teachers are out is because of the absurd quarantine rules.
If you are fully vaccinated, but not boosted, you are required to quarantine for 5-10 days if you were exposed to someone with "confirmed or suspected COVID-19." At present the rate of boosters across the adult population is around 20%.
Can you imagine how often a teacher is exposed to someone with a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19? I'm not trashing on teachers specifically here. It's human nature.
TLDR... 40% of the teachers aren't out sick with COVID-19. The quarantine rules are taking a problem and turning it into a catastrophe.
It honestly seems as if our quarantine rules in NYC are based on best available data from April 2020.
(Well, we could - replace whiteboards with screens, have the students onsite but the teachers remote. Not sure this is entirely practical?)
You need some adult to supervise the classroom
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
You really need to use all the data for countries that are reasonably western/developed (to avoid Africa with a much younger population and less testing biasing everything). It's all available and there are no valid excuses not to. As I never tire of pointing out, Swedish people aren't aliens and nobody claimed they were before they inconveniently proved the countermeasures weren't warranted. If you use all the data (from developed countries), Sweden ends up way ahead, which is conclusive proof of many things.
With this, it really does't matter if zero children 5-18 have died of covid - the school still can't operate correctly with half of its staff missing.
Solving "sending children to school" without solving "having teachers available" results in zero education, only free childcare. If that's the goal, sure, shove them all in study hall. If we actually plan to educate them, we need to figure out how to insulate the educators from the children.
Between vaccinations and the nature of the current variant, the mortality rate is essentially a non-issue. That's fantastic news. But it doesn't change that during a surge of cases, on-site schooling isn't really fit for purpose. "Probably won't die" isn't the only relevant metric.