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(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Students return to Highland High School in Salt Lake City on Monday, Feb. 8, 2021.

By The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board

| Feb. 19, 2021, 6:30 p.m.

But it is the Legislature that holds the pursestrings and makes the policy. And, for many lawmakers, education is less a public institution than a culture wars wedge issue.

Lawmakers often cant seem to mention public schools unless it is to criticize, undermine or defund them, or to score political points by attacking the schools for engaging in social engineering or, well, not engaging in social engineering.

The health situation in Utah schools, even with no pandemics, suffers from our longstanding policy of stacking em deep and teaching em cheap, with too few nurses or counselors and sometimes hardly any room to turn around. It is hardly surprising, then, that many teachers, parents and students are not eager to return to school full time, and some school boards and administrators are reluctant to call them back, even as they acknowledge the limitations of remote learning.

These feelings survive despite growing scientific evidence that schools have not been the sort of superspreader locations that they were reasonably feared to be.

Younger children, to our great relief, seem particularly resistant to the coronavirus, both in terms of becoming ill and transmitting the disease to their older relatives.

In secondary schools, evidence suggests that students and their families are much more likely to contract the disease from places other than school, including typical teenage-heavy spots as shopping centers and restaurants, or just hanging out at each others homes.

One thing we should all take from this experience is that teachers are really important, and that dreams of replacing them with computers have been exposed as, well, flawed.

All of us, members of the Legislature particularly, should be working with schools and teachers, not against them, to make the necessary return to schools not only be safe, but feel that way.

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Tribune Editorial: Utah schools need to open. The Legislature isn't helping. - Salt Lake Tribune